Difference between calories and kilocalories.

Strict calorie control today is an incredibly popular thing, because taking care of yourself, dieting, losing weight in the gym is not just fashionable, but very fashionable. The fight against mysterious calories is being fought on all fronts. They are carefully and scrupulously counted, they are stubbornly and purposefully spent... True, sometimes no less mysterious kilocalories appear on the stage, which add intrigue and further confuse those who are actively losing weight. What is the difference between calories and kilocalories? Let's try to figure it out.

Definition

Calorie - a unit for measuring the energy value of food, and also a unit for measuring energy and work.

Kilocalorie - one thousand calories (by analogy with gram and kilogram, meter and kilometer).

Comparison

It's actually pretty simple. A kilocalorie is one thousand calories. And calories measure energy, including heat. For this, there is also such a unit of measurement as the joule. Perhaps not everyone remembers the school physics course, but meanwhile 1 calorie is equal to 4.18 joules. True, the name joule is used more and more often in scientific works. But it is the calorie content that is indicated on food products. It should be borne in mind that a calorie indicates the amount of energy required to heat one gram of water by one degree Celsius. But today a calorie is used as an equivalent to everyone's understanding of the energy value of foods.

And here again confusion arises, since the energy value of almost all foods is quite large and is measured in kilocalories. Therefore, most manufacturers indicate the term "kcal" - "kilocalories" on the packaging of the goods. But there are also foods that simply write "calories", which misleads consumers. Wrong spelling is often "sinned" and exercise equipment in sports clubs, which indicate the number of calories spent by practitioners (although we are talking about kilocalories). Namely, in kilocalories, a person's daily diet is usually calculated. It is easier to count kilocalories, because such values ​​contain fewer zeros.

The chain is as follows: we eat any product, there is a process of processing energy into heat, which is, relatively speaking, kilocalories. Moreover, according to scientists, in 1 gram of carbohydrates, as in 1 gram of protein, there are four kcal. But in 1 gram of fat there are much more kilocalories - as much as nine. That is why, in the first place, fatty foods are the cause of extra grams and even kilograms.

Conclusions TheDifference.ru

  1. Calorie is a component of a kilocalorie, one kilocalorie (kcal) contains 1000 calories.
  2. Calories usually refer to the energy value of a food or the loss of "excess" in the gym, and calories are used to calculate a person's daily diet.
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