Calories are back.
Not that they ever really disappeared, but somewhere in the fat-free frenzy, some of us lost sight of one of the laws of thermodynamics. People ate fat-reduced cookies, crackers and cakes, and the calories added up. They didn't lose weight. Maybe they even gained.
Now Nabisco is splashing calorie comparisons on some of its SnackWell's packages. Other food companies have calorie-reduced foods in the works. The Calorie Control Council, which represents the "lite" food industry, has mounted a "Calories Still Count" campaign. And health authorities are realizing that their simple message to "reduce fat" may have been too simple.
"Calories are definitely back," says John Foreyt, director of the Nutrition Research Clinic at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, where he has started counseling patients to count calories again, not just grams of fat.
Those frustrated with nutritional flip-flopping may see the return to calories as just another reason to throw up their hands. But here's how it happened: Health authorities originally told Americans to slash fat from their diets to lower the risk of heart disease and cancer. People then looked to fat reduction as the solution to obesity too.
And the scientific community is partly to blame, says Nancy Ernst, nutrition coordinator of the government's National Cholesterol Education Program. Epidemiological studies showed that lower fat consumption translated to weight reduction, she said. But there were no data showing whether in a food market like the United States, eating less fat would necessarily equate with eating fewer calories.
Subjects in the studies ate foods naturally lower in fat (and calories), like fruits, vegetables and grains, not reduced-fat cookies and crackers.
In the real world, an aggressive food industry went gangbusters marketing the fat-reduction concept, even though in some cases those lower-fat desserts and snacks have negligible reductions in calories (more sugar or other carbohydrates are added to replace the fat). Then there's the American tendency to want it all, especially when it's fat-free.
The ironic conclusion to all this attention to nutrition is that Americans keep getting fatter. No wonder: We're eating more calories.
Still, calorie consumption has not risen enough to account for all of the rise in obesity, said Sue Borra, a dietitian with the International Food Information Council, a nonprofit group funded by the food industry. People have become less active. That's why in this round of calorie counting, the emphasis is on calories expended, Borra said. That means exercise.
