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Comment by Kodix | Hacker News Reader

You're really making it sound more complex and difficult than it is.

Oh, sure, it's difficult to say with certainty that 100 calories on the label will be exactly 100 calories for every person ever - but there's really not a gigantic amount of variance. Certainly it's a good enough guideline for use.

It's a matter of thermodynamics more than anything else. You can't get energy from nothing. Quantifying the exact amount of energy you'll get from a food is difficult to do precisely, but the guidelines we have are good enough for use for the vast majority of people. You can be pedantic about it, but that won't change the fact that it is that simple to lose weight, as proven time and again.

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"You're really making it sound more complex and difficult than it is."

And you are suggesting it's simple with no actual data to back it up. Can you cite a single study that shows that nutrition label calories were anywhere close to actual calories burned by a person. Or any mechanism people have to find calories:

Here's one that says the opposite: http://www.livescience.com/26799-calorie-counts-inaccurate.h...

For example, for most people, they discovered almonds have 20% less calories than "estimated".

http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/96/2/296.abstract

That's a huge variance.

"but there's really not a gigantic amount of variance." Citation needed :)

"Quantifying the exact amount of energy you'll get from a food is difficult to do precisely, but the guidelines we have are good enough for use for the vast majority of people."

What do you think vast majority is? Given the variance in everything else, we are probably talking 20-30% of the population.

"You can be pedantic about it, but that won't change the fact that it is that simple to lose weight, as proven time and again."

I'm not being pedantic about the mechanism. I'm being reasonable about the fact that the method most people have to figure out whether what they have is going to be successful is useless (IE if they can't determine how many calories they eat/burn, they can't possibly change the numbers :P)

Improving the accuracy of the label is a good goal, but from your own link:

Some researchers say that, on the whole, the inaccuracies in calorie estimates don't make a big difference. "For most uses, I think they're good enough," said Malden Nesheim, professor of nutrition emeritus at Cornell University, in Ithaca, N.Y., and co-author of the book "Why Calories Count" (University of California Press, 2012).

People tend to eat a variety of foods, not just almonds or starches. So overestimating or underestimating the calories in one particular food will likely not have a huge impact on a person's daily calorie intake, Nesheim said.

And generally, the omissions in the Atwater system tend to result in overestimates, meaning they likely wouldn't interfere with weight loss.

"It would only be a problem for people who want to gain weight," said Mary Ellen Camire, a professor at the University of Maine's Department of Food Science & Human Nutrition in Orono.

> I'm not being pedantic about the mechanism. I'm being reasonable about the fact that the method most people have to figure out whether what they have is going to be successful is useless (IE if they can't determine how many calories they eat/burn, they can't possibly change the numbers :P)

The problem isn't with nutritional labels of varying accuracy, but with people under-estimating the calories per portion (without reading the label) and who serve enormous portions.

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