Still More Calories ... And a rant :-)

Probably the most annoying calorie discussion I'd come across recently has to be Stefani Ruper's discussion about this article in Science Magazine, Have We Been Miscounting Calories?, entitled They’re Still Doing It Wrong: Have We Been Miscounting Calories?  Read the article first and then Stefani's take.  I sort of wish I had to know if her take came off as badly in that order, but you can't undo.  

From the article:

In a wide-ranging discussion of how food is digested in everything from humans to rats to pythons, the panel reviewed a new spate of studies showing that foods are processed differently as they move from our gullet to our guts and beyond. They agreed that net caloric counts for many foods are flawed because they don't take into account the energy used to digest food; the bite that oral and gut bacteria take out of various foods; or the properties of different foods themselves that speed up or slow down their journey through the intestines, such as whether they are cooked or resistant to digestion.

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Sweeteners

If you're not sitting down reading this, you might just want to, or grab onto something for support, because I'm going to start this post out doing something I don't all that often: praise Mark Sisson.   The sample menu page on his blog reads:

A typical breakfast for me is a cup of coffee with cream and sugar and an omelet

This page has been around for a good long time and he hasn't changed it, so presumably Sisson hasn't jumped headlong on the stevia wagon.  In the summer, as a kid, we would suck on honeysuckle blossoms for the faint sweetness.  Needless to say, we did this more for the novelty of "hey, this is sweet" than scavenging for every blossom we could find for a sweet kick ... they just weren't that sweet.   If one googles chewing and sugarcane or stevia leaves you will find references to both.    If you are ever in New England in late winter/early spring, you'll see the maple syrup taps on trees.  The dried syrup that may ooze from the tap, etc., also tastes sweet.  We humans tend to like sweet stuff, and when found in nature, we'll chew/suck or otherwise extract the sweet leaving the rest behind.  But the only foods that are truly sweet eaten whole (or at least most) are fruits and honey.  I suppose we could add in the faintly sweet root veggies as well.  

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