Definition: "An ergogenic aid is any substance or phenomenon that enhances performance "
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05.04.2013 |
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There are more calories in your food than you think
The Calorie Detective
Neistat bought five foods that he likes to eat and took them to researchers at Columbia University, who analysed exactly how many kcals the products contained. And – surprise! – they contained more than the manufacturers had declared. If Neistat had eaten all five products on the same day, he'd have consumed 548 kcal more than the information on the labels indicated.
Study
Results
The horizontal axis represents the number of kcals the restaurants said were in their products; the vertical axis represents the number of kcals the researchers found. Where the value on the vertical axis is 0, it means that the researchers found as many kcals in the product as the makers claimed. Where the value is +10, the researchers found 10 percent more kcals in the product than the makers claimed.
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The figure above shows the results for ready-made supermarket meals. Once again, the labels consistently underestimate the number of kcals. More data on the products analysed are reproduced in the table below. Click on it and a larger version will appear.
The researchers confined their study to low-calorie meals. You'd expect these foods to be accurately labelled with the amount of calories they contain, but on average they contained 8 percent more kcals than the labels indicated.
We're not aware of any similar research on European food products, but we suspect the situation is no better than in the US. We hear only too often about European bodybuilders who have worked out in minute detail the amount they eat, yet don't lose weight even though their calculations indicate that they are consuming a couple of hundred kcals less than they are burning. The bodybuilders nearly always use the data provided on the labels.
The solution is simple: prepare and cook as much of your food as possible yourself, using pure ingredients, and avoid ready-made products. Every calorie-counter book will give you the exact number of calories for real foods like potatoes, vegetables, fruit, meat, eggs and fish. What's more, a real food diet is much healthier too.
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