Calorie Counts: Fatally Flawed, Or Our Best Defense Against
Pudge? Eat 200 calories of baby carrots, and you're going to be
doing a lot more chomping than if you eat 200 calories of gummy
bears. Any dieter can tell you that. So can a 200-calorie photo
shoot that's making the rounds on the Internet this week. But
when it comes to losing or maintaining weight, a calorie is a
calorie is a calorie, right? Just as the federal government is
getting ready to launch a nationwide requirement for posted
calorie counts in restaurants, some scientists are mounting an
assault on the century-old system for measuring the calories,
saying it doesn't accurately measure the energy people get from
food. To be clear, "we think food labels are a good idea," says
Rachel Carmody, a postdoc at Harvard University who studies how
cooking and processing changes food energy. "We just want to
make sure that the information communicated is as accurate as
possible." The current standard, called the Atwater system after
the USDA scientist w