This week reports out of Great Britain have dieters celebrating. The UK’s Scientific Advisory Council on Nutrition, has just released a draft proposal raising the average daily recommended calorie limits by 16% or about 400 calories.
Has the average British citizen been eating too little despite the fact that approximately 60% of the population is either overweight or obese? The Council claims that for 18 years it has been underestimating the activity levels of the population.
It sounds too good to be true and it is. The fact is that the average daily recommended calorie intake is a number for discussion purposes only and for food package labeling and is really not relevant to the number of calories that any individual should be consuming every day. In the U.S. for instance, every food label bases its calculations on a theoretical diet of 2,000 calories per day.
It would be absurd to think there is one optimum number of calories for every man or woman. Each individual is burning different amounts of calories every day depending on their activity level, and also on the metabolic rate at which they burn those calories.
And calories are elusive little things. They may be easily tracked by scientists in a lab but can be fairly slippery when translated to actual food choices by the average consumer. Even for many of us who try diligently to tally calories every day, it’s a fairly hopeless exercise since our personal estimates are probably nowhere near the truth.
The best choice for eating accurate calories is to stick to foods that come with a label, but those are mostly processed and denatured and not at all the fresh whole foods that we should be eating.
If we stick to eating restaurant foods that come with menu disclosure we may fare no better since restaurant calorie estimates can be 30 to 40% off the mark.
If consumers are not benefitting from an increased recommended daily allowance of calories, who is? Food companies selling processed foods with nutrition labels. When they disclose what percentage of your daily fat or calorie content is contained in one serving of their product, that number under the new British guidelines will now be reduced and the product will seem healthier.
What’s a consumer to do? Stop counting calories and just eat healthy whole foods. It’s that simple.
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Comments
Amen. I hate these questionable studies and their sometimes absurd conclusions. Some researchers do a lot more harm than good - eg. the government agency that recently determined that women should not get a mammogram until the age of 50.
The studies are not the problem. The problem is how they are communicated to general population. In this particular case, the proposal is still a draft and IF it´s approved it will be addressed to health professionals and, AGAIN, not to general population.
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