Unless you enjoy your beef patties uncooked and straight from the fridge, there may be more calories hiding in that hamburger than you think. Harvard researcher Rachel Carmody says that our standard method of measuring calorie content doesn't account for the ways heat changes food. Cooking adds calories, Carmody says, and she's got some Atkins-adherent mice to back her up.
The calorie numbers on food labels are calculated according to how many grams of fat, carbohydrate, and protein the food contains, and how calorie-dense each of those nutrients is. It's simple math and chemistry. But since calories are a unit of energy--how much energy you, as an eating animal, manage to extract from your meal--biology should be a part of the equation, too. Our standard calorie math doesn't consider how much energy we expend chewing and digesting our food, or what components of our meal go toward feeding our gut ...
