Useless fun fact of the day...

Yesterday as I was feeding Carsten his lunch, I was hoping that it was enough to fill him up... enough calories to do the job. You see, Carsten never wants to eat whether he is hungry or not, so I can't trust him to make sure he gets enough. If I left it up to him, he would only eat enough to sustain a newborn. But, I digress...

So, as I was wondering this, I started to try and estimate how many calories he was taking in from the food I was giving him, which led to another interesting thought... How do they figure out how many calories are in a food? So, what did I do? Well, I asked the walking encyclopedia of useless information... my husband. And yes, believe it or not, he knew. Here is the answer, which, for some reason, I thought was really interesting:

Heat is applied to whatever food they are trying to determine the caloric count of (an apple, a candy bar, a piece of bacon, etc.) and the caloric count is the amount of heat energy that it takes to disenergrate (sp?) the food item... until it is gone... burned to nothing. This makes perfect sense. The more calories a food has, the longer we are full... the more energy it gives us. When the calories are gone (or disenergrated), then we are hungry again. We burn the calories of an apple much sooner than we burn the calories of a hot dog. In Europe, calories are not calories, they are called "Energy", which I think is a better description of what a calorie really is.

Sorry for the bore of an entry today, but at least you learned something. And without knowledge, we are but a bunch of mindless Paris Hilton or "W" clones.