How about counting every calorie?

High calorie foods are bad for my health.

It takes about 10 calories to produce every calorie of food that we consume in the West.

These two nutritional maxims give credence to the food industry s self serving corollaries If a calorie is a calorie, then any food can be part of a balanced diet and, if we are what we eat, then everyone chooses what they eat. Again, both are misleading.

For me it may be every calorie you consume, you conserve, because I come from a very cold climate.

For every calorie of food that we consume here in Britain today, 10 calories are taken to produce it.

There was a notable difference in the minimum individual calorie requirement, ranging from below 2,000 to almost 3,000 kilocalories.

Bodies that were built to hang onto every calorie found themselves swimming in the superfluous calories of the post war Western diet.

One little software program, called the fat insulin receptor gene, basically says, Hold onto every calorie, because the next hunting season may not work out so well.

SAN FRANCISCO Two seemingly benign nutritional maxims are at the root of all dietary evil A calorie is a calorie, and You are what you eat. 160 Both ideas are now so entrenched in public consciousness that they have become virtually unassailable. As a result, the food industry, aided and abetted by ostensibly well meaning scientists and politicians, has afflicted humankind with the plague of chronic metabolic disease, which threatens to bankrupt health care worldwide.

SAN FRANCISCO Two seemingly benign nutritional maxims are at the root of all dietary evil A calorie is a calorie, and You are what you eat. Both ideas are now so entrenched in public consciousness that they have become virtually unassailable. As a result, the food industry, aided and abetted by ostensibly well meaning scientists and politicians, has afflicted humankind with the plague of chronic metabolic disease, which threatens to bankrupt health care worldwide.

Yes, walk into your local mega grocery emporium or just about any food selling area anywhere in the world and stare the problem in the face. There s inexpensive, high calorie food piled all over the place.

A funding shortfall had obliged the World Food Programme to cut back essential food rations for refugees in Africa, where it had been unable to provide even the minimum daily calorie requirement for the past eleven months.

Likewise, the US continues to lead in entrepreneurship, research and development, higher education, and technological innovation. Moreover, it is now the world s largest natural gas producer and calorie exporter, which has reduced its vulnerability to price shocks or food shortages.

Meat production is about ten times more water intensive than plant based calories and proteins, with one kilogram of beef, for example, requiring 15,415 liters of water. It is also an inefficient way of generating food up to 30 crop calories are needed to produce one meat calorie.

You can reduce the burden to some extent by creating a community of your customers (and prospects) so that they can listen to one another. Take a site I just visited this morning, for Fitbit, a self monitoring tool that lets you measure your physical motion, and by implication your exercise, calorie consumption, sleep time, and other factors.

Food has become more plentiful and affordable, especially in the developing world, where calorie availability has increased by 40 per person over the past 40 years, while food prices have more than halved. Consequently, the proportion of hungry in the Third World has dropped from 50 in 1950 to less than 17 today, while worldwide incomes have increased more than three fold.

I think about this challenge a lot these days, because my new startup, called HICCup (Health Initiative Coordinating Council), aims (in part) to help people do just that on a massive scale, though initially concentrated in just a few communities. The point is not to turn everyone into an obsessive calorie , weight , or step counter, but to get people to be better self manipulators.

In the field of diet and nutrition, there is a fundamental debate between calorie counters and proponents of specific diets, whether low fat, low carbohydrate, or buy my line of expensive formulated products. The issue is less whether any such diet works in general (though some of them are actually unhealthy) than whether more than a few individuals can follow such a regimen over the long term.

It is worth considering how easy it would be to do away with a troublesome prisoner being force fed by merely adjusting the calorie level. If it is too low, the prisoner will starve, but too high a level can also kill, since deliberate liquid overfeeding by tube, to which Guantánamo prisoners have reported being subjected, causes vomiting, diarrhea, and deadly dehydration that can stop one s heart.