Calories on food packaging have for decades been a calculation of absorbable nutrients. Your log would have a very low calorie count if it lay in stores.
The article (which I have read) argues the opposite - that calorie counts on packaging are in fact rather unrelated to the availability of energy in the food. Most are calculated using an 100+ year outdated and never reproduced study of basic food groups which used a calorimeter (that burns the food). Your log would therefore have a pretty high calorie count.
This is incorrect. An bomb calorometer is almost never used in the US nowadays, and not allowed in the EU. A 1990 NLEA law [1] [2] requires calorie contents to be based on nutritional components.
The article of this post does not explicitly state that a bomb calorometer is still in use, but it is very implied. I do not really like to article because it omissions and framing like this to support its narrative.
We don't use the bomb calorimeter today, but we still use the Atwater system (with a quick tweak for fiber) for those "nutritional components." All that means is instead of burning the food ourselves we're looking at a table that the guy who burned the foods created... with his bomb calorimeter.[1] The only reason we're marginally better now is because we're starting to take into account digestibility (e.g. Carbs have non-digestible fiber subtracted before the calories are calculated).[2]
So you're repeating the exact point I was making. A bomb calorimeter is not used anymore today. Altough it is very interesting that the 4 kcal/g protein etc values are still used based on that research, I thought the values had been better determined nowadays. At least progress is possible and being made.
But still, what the gp says was that a wooden log would have a food label with a high calorie content. That is not correct.
But still, what the gp says was that a wooden log would have a food label with a high calorie content. That is not correct.
Was the original comment edited? As it reads now, the GP makes no mention of a label, only the factually correct statement that a log "is several megacalories" (ie, hardwood releases about 20 kCal/g when burned) but "you'll starve eating it" (ie, human digestion is not able to make use of this energy).
You are right that a current nutritional label would not show the log has having any significant number of calories, but the GP's actual post never said that it would. What makes you visualize this non-existent food label and then claim it is incorrect, as opposed to accepting their statement as written?
The article is about how "the calorie is dead" (title), in the context of human consumption. The GP says "makes sense, a log of wood is several megacalories but you'll starve eating it".
My point is that a log would have a food label with very little calories, not several megacalories. It does not "make sense" to use as support for "the calorie is dead".
Exactly, energy that one can't use,and do they like do a chromatographic separation before calorimetry or what??
I also do wonder about the calories in ethanol. Apparently its immediate metabolism does produce a few atp, but the fact that hangover cures are universally high calorie foods suggests that the downstream steps might be endothermic or rate limited by fat, if that's even possible
