Half a cup of chickpeas is 100 calories, but only four tablespoons of hummus.

This is because it contains olive oil that is high in fats bringing up the calorie count.

But what is a calorie?

A calorie is simply a measurement of energy when it comes to food, A calorie with an upper case.

C Now this is important weirdly is the amount of energy it takes to heat up one kg of water by one degree Celsius.

In other words it's basically how much energy is available in the foods that we eat.

We've become so obsessed with counting calories because if we eat more energy than we can use, that extra energy actually can get stored in our bodies as fat or muscles and our society seems to be obsessed with fat and muscles.

But the way we actually calculate calories and foods is based on the Atwater system which is derived from experiments done over 100 years ago, basically.

Mr Atwater said four calories per gram of protein, nine calories per gram and fat And four calories per gram and carbohydrates.

But we now know not all calories are the same where you get the calories from matters.

Most of us may have heard the term empty calories.

It refers to foods that have lots of calories, but little of the nutrients our bodies need to literally survive.

This amount of Eminem's contains 100 calories, but no vitamins, and only 1% of the calcium and iron.

You need 100 calories of hazelnuts, on the other hand, will give you a good chunk of your daily vitamin E.

And magnesium.

This is one example of why Canon calories can be unhealthy but also very confusing.

100 calories is a third of a chicken breast or a quarter cup of macaroni with nothing else.

Hashtag white people food or a third of an impossible burger patty or one third of a scotch, egg, half a veggie sushi roll or three ounces of pallet paneer.

You could make a smoothie with half a banana, 12.5 strawberries, 65 blueberries which is 100 calories.

Or just make a smoothie with water and protein powder.

As most protein powders tend to be 100 calories per serving and long after Mr Atwater died.

We learned a lot about our metabolism.

It's not just calories in.

There's a wide range of factors that affect how our calories and the food we eat affects our bodies.

It all starts with physically breaking apart the food in our mouth chewing these smaller chewed up bites go down as abolish to our stomach where acid breaks down cell walls into the small intestine where lots of enzymes and bacteria get to work breaking down molecules into glucose which we can use in our cells for energy in this process calories aren't treated all the same in our body.

It takes more energy to break down protein than carbohydrates.

So the net gain of calories is higher with carbs for example, 100 calories of turkey slices takes more energy to digest than 100 calories of vanilla, buttercream cake processing food helps humans extract lots of calories.

Even simple mashing and heating starts the process of breaking down food.

So there's less our bodies have to do heavy duty processed food yields more calories for the same reason.

So a handful of raw grains would be hard for our body to digest and mostly pass through us fiber so we wouldn't absorb many calories.

But a yummy slice of multi grain bread would give us 109 calories.

But even then once the food is ground or cooked, our bodies absorb again these calories differently.

That slice of bread might be a good source of nutrients for one person, but a trip to the bathroom for someone with celiac disease, celiac is a genetic disease.

That's essentially an allergen to gluten.

That's just one example of how genetics affects our digestion.

But it's not just genetics, it's also our microbiome to all those tens of trillions of bacteria, archaea and other microbes mostly in your gut make up your microbiome without them.

We couldn't break down basic foods for instance, the microbiome helps babies break down sugars from the mother's milk.

It is important, but everyone's microbiome is slightly different so people can access different nutrients based on their microbiome, for example, about 50% of those living in asia can break down certain compounds in soy.

While only 25 to 30% of us, people in north America can.

The delicate balance of microbes might be set early in childhood.

We get our first dose of bacteria from our mama but then it changes based on what we eat and what's in our environment.

These shifts could alter the way calories are absorbed.

The ability to break down soy is actually decreasing in younger generations.

In japan.

Maybe due to the rise of a more Western diet, most people have a combination of two types of bacteria in their gut back troy ditties and firm acute.

Studies show that people with a greater proportion of firm acute tend to be more obese mice given a microbiome transplant from obese sources tend to gain weight when fed the same diet.

This microbe combo could break down sugars more easily and be so efficient at extracting calories from food that rather than just passing through more calories get absorbed and stored as this could explain why two people could eat lots of 100 calorie servings of peanut butter candy and one person gains weight while their other friend doesn't at all.

So the caloric value of anything meat, fruit bread that jesus will change based on your microbiome, the way it's processed your genetics.

So it feels like maybe it's time for us to change the concept of what a calorie is.

Go forth and feast with this new knowledge.

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