No Need To Argue About Kilojoules Vs Nutritional Quality: Both Matter

No Need To Argue About Kilojoules Vs Nutritional Quality: Both Matter

In a world where people market butter in their coffee as a weight loss and mental-boosting elixir, we hear similar noise from folks clamouring that a food’s nutritional quality and “wholeness” matter far more than its calories, whereas others treat the body like a computer and focus solely on the numbers. So, who’s right? Actually, both are.

Image by thebittenword.com.

Obesity expert Dr. Yoni Freedhoff of the University of Ottawa and Weighty Matters preaches the importance of both food quality and kilojoules, noting:

…we still need a surplus of calories to gain and a deficit to lose.

But foods matter too. Choice of food matters in terms of health, but also in terms of how many calories our body expends in digesting, and more importantly, upon satiety, which in turn has a marked impact upon how many calories and which foods, we choose to eat.

In other words, your ideal diet should focus on both, and they work in tandem to bolster your health and your weight management efforts.

While there are certainly stories of people who have subsisted on nothing but pizza or chicken nuggets for decades and appear to be healthy and of normal weight, don’t let outliers throw your common sense out the window. Besides, food is good and good for you beyond the biological context of just gaining or losing weight.

Head over to Weighty Matters in the link below to read more of Dr. Freedhoff’s sensible advice and musings on current conversations around the health and medical industry.

The False Dichotomy Between Food [Weighty Matters]


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