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Nuts May Now Have Lower Calorie Counts, Almonds 23% Less, Here Is Why

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If you are in the habit of memorizing KIND bar labels, you may notice kind of a drop in the calorie counts for some of their bars. Actually, in some cases, the drop can be as much as going from 200 calories down to 170 calories as seen by this graphic:

A 30 calorie drop is not insignificant. That’s over half a cucumber, depending on the size of your cucumber. The reason for the update in calorie counts is not because the bars have shrunk or that ingredients have been changed to something else like air. What’s changing is nuts. Or rather the way calories are measured for various tree nuts.

Daniel Lubetzky, founder and Executive Chairman of KIND Healthy Snacks, said that he believes that “KIND is the first snack brand to adjust the calorie counts on labels to reflect a new more accurate method of measuring calories in nuts.”

The “calorie” that appears on a food label is actually equal to 1,000 calorie energy units or a kilocalorie, as Jim Painter, PhD, RD, described for Scientific American. This is how much energy it takes to increase the temperature of one kilogram of water by one degree Celsius.

How then have people measured calories in food? Well, originally, it was the bomb. That is, something called a bomb calorimeter, a sealed container that is surrounded by water. You can place the food in the container and then set it afire. When the food has been totally burned, voilà, the bump in the water temperature per water volume gives you the calorie measurement.

Now, it’s not as if every food manufacturer has someone constantly setting all of its products on fire. Instead, a more indirect method, called the “Atwater system,” has been the typical way to determine calorie counts for food labels. As Painter described, this system takes the average calorie counts for major nutrients such as protein (4 Kcal/g), carbohydrates (4 Kcal/g), fat (9 Kcal/g), and alcohol (7 Kcal/g) that were originally determined by burning them and then multiplies these averages by the nutrient content of the food item of interest. Painter gave the example of an energy bar containing 10 g of protein, 20 g of carbohydrates and 9 g of fat translating via the Atwater method to 201 kcals or calories for the label. He added that traditionally the carbohydrate amounts used in this calculation is actually the total carbohydrates minus the amount of fiber, because fiber is not digested and tends to run right out through your poop.

Speaking of poop, this method sort of lumps together different foods that happen to provide a given nutrient. This may not be very accurate. Like people, food can be a lot more complex than just existing in the broad nutrient categories. After all, telling your significant other “for Valentine’s Day dinner, let’s just break open some Ensure and share a straw” may not go over so well. Your body handles different foods differently based on their structure, form, and many other factors beyond simple nutrient composition. Your body is not just a sealed container surrounded by water that then sets food on fire, unless, of course, you happen to be a furnace in a swimming pool.

This past decade David J Baer, PhD, Janet A Novotny, PhD, and Sarah K Gebauer, PhD, from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) have gotten the poop on what actually happens to various nuts. For example, in a study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, the three researchers fed 18 healthy adults a “controlled diet” or “an almond-containing diet” for 18 days. They then did what you always do when you feed someone. They collected their pee and poop. This was to analyze how much of the almonds were actually metabolized and converted into energy for the body and how much ended up being disposed of by the body.

Based on these measurements, the study found the energy content of almonds to be on average 4.6 kilocalories per gram, which is about 129 kilocalories per 28 gram serving. This is about 23% less than what’s calculated by the Atwater method (i.e., 6.0 to 6.1 kilocalories per gram or 168 to 170 kilocalories per serving.) That would be about a 23% to 24% drop in the calorie count for almonds. In other words, the Atwater method may be overestimating the energy content or calorie counts of almonds by 32%.

This “tree-oh” of scientists did something similar for another tree nut: walnuts. As detailed by a publication in the Journal of Nutrition, they found the calorie counts for walnuts to be 21% less than what was calculated by the Atwater method. The research also tried the same approach for cashews.

All of this should be good news if you would like to go nuts but are worried about their caloric content. Many nutrition experts have extolled the health benefits of eating nuts such as almonds, walnuts, and cashews. They are a good source of fiber, antioxidants, protein, and other nutrients such as vitamin E, magnesium, phosphorus, copper, manganese, and selenium.

Will new calorie counts convince you to lower the bar, the snack bar, that is, into your mouth? Well, first make sure that you check the calorie count and other parts of the snack bar’s nutrition label first, like the ingredients. The new tree nut calorie counts may not really affect snack bars that don’t have nuts as a more dominant ingredient. But it looks like these new calorie counts may be in KIND, so to speak. “Calorie concerns may be a major reason why people are not consuming more tree nuts,” explained Lubetzky. “This more accurate way to count calories will affect about 95% of our nut bars.”

While the USDA Nutrition Database still hasn’t been fully updated to reflect the new tree nut calorie counts, Lubetzky relayed that KIND “asked permission from the FDA and the USDA to use this new system [to count calories in nuts].” In this case, FDA refers to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and not the Flying Dentists Association.

This is yet further evidence that nutrition is a lot more complex than currently understood. And better understanding and appreciating this complexity should be a priority. As I have written before for Forbes, non-communicable diseases (NCDs), like obesity, heart disease, and cancer, have become the leading cause of death around the world. Diet can greatly affect your risk of NCDs. “Food is increasingly responsible for health and more responsible for deaths,” said Lubetzky. “All calories are not the same.”

However, as he related, “there is not enough money being spent on nutrition research. There can be an inertia and no incentive to do more research and make changes.” Lubetzky added, “over 50% consumer goods lead with sugar. Compared to refined carbohydrates, almonds and other tree nuts are very expensive.”

Indeed, no single measure can tell you everything about a food item. That would be like using the number of times you’ve watched the Twilight movies as a measure of who you are. Any single measure itself can be flawed and vary depending on how you record and calculate it. That’s why telling you to focus on just a single measure when trying to determine what to eat would frankly be nuts.

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