Not all calories are created equal.
The Calorie Myth: Why 100 Calories of Almonds Isn't the Same as 100 Calories of Skittles
How we confused speed with velocity and condemned ourselves to running fast on a hamster wheel going nowhere
Not all calories are created equal.
The Thought Experiment: Hold Out Your Hands
Picture this: In your left hand, you're holding 100 calories of almonds (about 14 almonds). In your right hand, 100 calories of Skittles (about 25 pieces).
Same calories. Same "energy."
Could you survive on one versus the other?
The answer is obvious. You could live indefinitely on almonds. You would die on Skittles alone—not slowly, not eventually, but relatively quickly from malnutrition, organ failure, and systemic collapse.
So how can they be considered the same "energy"?
They can't. Because calories aren't just energy. They're instructions. They're building blocks. They're signals to your hormones, your gut microbiome, your liver, your brain.
A calorie is a unit of heat energy—specifically, the energy needed to raise one kilogram of water by one degree Celsius. It's a physics measurement, borrowed to describe food. And therein lies the problem: we're using a unit designed to measure heat combustion to describe the infinitely complex biological process of human metabolism.
The Animal Studies We Can't Ignore
When researchers feed cats and monkeys a diet of only processed foods like potato chips for ten generations, the animals become infertile and extremely sick—literally killing out their species.
Not in a hundred generations. Not in fifty. In ten.
Now ask yourself: How many generations of Americans have grown up on processed foods, sugary cereals, fast food, and engineered snacks?
We're currently in about the third or fourth generation since processed foods became dominant in the American diet (roughly 1950s-1960s onward).
Do we want to wait until generation ten to see what happens to us?
Obviously, we're not doing a good job already:
Childhood obesity has more than doubled since the 1970s
Adolescent obesity has quadrupled (4x)
A third of Americans have non-alcoholic fatty liver disease
50% of babies and toddlers under 3 consume an average of 50 grams of added sugar daily (their recommended limit is zero)
Teenagers average 144 grams of sugar per day—six times the adult limit
Fertility rates are declining across developed nations
Sperm counts have dropped by 50% in the past 40 years (remember those animals going infertile on a bad diet??)
Life expectancy declining in the U.S. for the first time in decades
They had to change the name of Type 2 diabetes. Once called “adult-onset diabetes”, they had to change the name since kids were getting it.
Children started developing Type 2 diabetes in significant numbers—something that had been virtually unheard of before the 1990s. Kids—some as young as elementary school age—were developing a disease that used to take 40-50 years of poor lifestyle habits to manifest.
The same is true for Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (NAFLD), which is now appearing in children at alarming rates. It used to be primarily a disease of chronic alcoholics—hence "non-alcoholic" was noteworthy. Now we're seeing it in kids who've never touched alcohol, caused primarily by heavy sugar consumption (particularly fructose, which is metabolized in the liver just like alcohol).
These aren't just semantic changes. They're warnings that our children's metabolic timelines are collapsing—diseases of decades appearing in years.
We're watching the experiment unfold in real time. And we're pretending it's just about "calories in, calories out."
The Car Analogy: Fuel Type Matters
Imagine you own a car designed to run on gasoline. One day, someone tells you: "Fuel is fuel. It's all just energy. Diesel has the same energy content as gasoline, so it doesn't matter which one you put in."
You try diesel. The engine sputters, knocks, and eventually fails.
"But it's the same BTUs!" they insist. "Same energy content!"
Correct. And completely irrelevant.
Because your engine wasn't designed for that fuel type. The chemical structure matters. The combustion properties matter. The byproducts matter.
Your body is infinitely more complex than a car engine. Different foods:
Are processed by different organs in different ways
Trigger different hormonal responses
Feed different populations of gut bacteria
Produce different metabolic byproducts
Require different amounts of energy to digest and process (thermogenesis)
Cause different levels of inflammation
Affect different signaling pathways
100 calories of almonds:
Contains protein, fiber, healthy fats, vitamin E, magnesium, calcium
Digests slowly, keeping blood sugar stable
Feeds beneficial gut bacteria
Requires significant energy to digest (high thermic effect)
Triggers satiety hormones
Provides building blocks for cell repair and hormone production
Reduces inflammation
Supports brain, heart, bone, and immune health
100 calories of Skittles:
Contains sugar, corn syrup, hydrogenated palm kernel oil, artificial colors and flavors
Spikes blood sugar rapidly, then crashes it
Feeds opportunistic gut bacteria, reduces microbial diversity
Requires minimal energy to digest
Triggers cravings for more sugar (dopamine pathway activation)
Provides zero building blocks for cellular repair
Promotes inflammation
Contributes to insulin resistance, fatty liver, hormonal disruption, and systemic stress
Same "energy." Completely different outcomes.
Speed vs. Velocity: The Physics of Nutrition
Here's where your analogy about speed versus velocity becomes brilliant.
Speed is pace without direction—a scalar measurement. You're going 60 mph. Great. But where?
Velocity is speed with direction—a vector measurement. You're going 60 mph northeast. Now we know something useful.
In physics, this distinction is critical. An object can have high speed but zero velocity if it's going in circles. Think of a hamster wheel—lots of movement, no progress.
The "calories in, calories out" model is speed. It measures quantity without direction.
"You consumed 2,000 calories and burned 2,000 calories. You're balanced!"
But where did those calories go?
Did they build muscle or fat?
Did they fuel your brain or spike your insulin?
Did they repair cellular damage or cause oxidative stress?
Did they support your gut microbiome or feed pathogenic bacteria?
Did they stabilize your mood or send you on a blood sugar roller coaster?
Nutritional quality is velocity. It's the direction those calories travel in your body.
You can consume the "right amount" of calories and still be metabolically sick, inflamed, hormonally disrupted, and nutritionally starved—running fast on a hamster wheel, going nowhere.
Or you can consume calories that build health, repair damage, stabilize hormones, and support longevity—traveling with purpose and direction.
The Question of Damage vs. Benefit
You asked the perfect question: Do these calories cause more damage than good? Work rather than relief?
This is where the calorie model completely breaks down.
When you eat 100 calories of almonds:
Your body expends energy digesting them (thermic effect: ~20-30% of calories)
You're left with ~70-80 usable calories
Those calories come packaged with nutrients that support metabolic processes
Net effect: Relief. Building. Repair.
When you eat 100 calories of Skittles:
Your body expends minimal energy digesting them (thermic effect: ~5-10%)
You're left with ~90-95 usable calories
Those calories trigger insulin spikes, inflammation, and cravings
Your liver must process the fructose load
Your pancreas must produce extra insulin
Your gut microbiome shifts toward dysbiosis
Your hormones get disrupted
Net effect: Work. Stress. Damage.
The Skittles might technically provide more "usable" calories, but at what cost?
It's like saying a loan shark offers the same "money" as a bank. Technically true. Practically disastrous.
What the Body Actually Needs
Humans are remarkably adaptable. We're scavengers, as you noted. We can survive on incredibly varied diets—from the mostly-meat Inuit diet to mostly-plant Mediterranean diets.
But here's what we cannot survive on:
Sugar alone
Corn syrup alone
Potato chips alone
Skittles alone
Any single processed food alone
Here's what we can survive—even thrive—on:
Almonds, seeds, and nuts
Meat, fish, and eggs
Vegetables, fruits, and tubers
Whole grains and legumes
Notice the pattern? Real food contains the instructions our cells need to function.
Every human culture in history, across vastly different environments and available foods, managed to stay healthy when they ate whole foods in relatively unprocessed forms.
It wasn't until we started eating engineered combinations of sugar, fat, salt, and chemical additives—foods that don't exist in nature, that our bodies have no evolutionary experience with—that we started seeing epidemics of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, autoimmune conditions, and mental health disorders.
The common denominator isn't the calorie count. It's the food quality.
The Nestle Paradox
Marion Nestle (again, no relation to the company) represents an interesting middle ground in nutrition science. She's skeptical of the "sugar is poison" camp, noting that total calorie consumption matters.
And she's right—to a point. If you're eating 5,000 calories a day of any food, you'll likely have health problems.
But here's what the pure calorie model misses:
Two people can eat the exact same number of calories and have completely different health outcomes based on food quality.
Study after study shows:
People who eat primarily whole foods tend to naturally regulate their calorie intake (they feel satisfied and stop eating)
People who eat primarily processed foods tend to overconsume calories (the engineered combination of sugar, fat, and salt overrides satiety signals)
So yes, total calories matter. But the TYPE of calories determines whether you can even regulate your intake properly.
The calorie model assumes willpower and conscious decision-making. But if your food is hijacking your dopamine pathways, disrupting your hormones, and dysregulating your hunger signals, willpower becomes irrelevant.
The Units We're Actually Measuring
Let's get technical for a moment, because this matters.
A calorie (technically a kilocalorie, or 1,000 small calories) measures the energy released when food is burned in a bomb calorimeter—a sealed container where the food is literally set on fire and the heat released is measured.
But your body is not a bomb calorimeter.
Your body:
Doesn't burn food; it breaks it down through enzymatic reactions
Extracts different amounts of energy from different foods based on digestibility
Expends different amounts of energy processing different foods (thermic effect)
Responds hormonally to different foods in different ways
Houses trillions of bacteria that also consume and process your food
Prioritizes different metabolic pathways based on what's available
The calorie is a physics measurement being applied to a biological system. It's like measuring the love in your marriage in joules. Technically you could, but you'd be missing the point entirely.
What we should be measuring:
Nutrient density (micronutrients per calorie)
Fiber content
Protein quality and quantity
Fat composition (omega-3 vs omega-6 ratios, saturated vs unsaturated)
Glycemic impact (how much it spikes blood sugar)
Inflammatory markers
Effects on gut microbiome diversity
Hormonal responses (insulin, leptin, ghrelin, cortisol)
Thermic effect of food
Bioavailability of nutrients
But "eat 2,000 calories a day" is simpler to put on a label than "eat foods that support metabolic health, hormonal balance, gut microbial diversity, and cellular repair while minimizing inflammation, insulin resistance, and oxidative stress."
So we went with simple. And wrong.
This is like using a thermometer to measure distance, or a scale to measure time. The tool doesn't match what you're trying to understand. We're using a unit designed to measure heat combustion to describe the infinitely complex biological process of human metabolism.
How We Arrived at This Mistake
In the late 1800s, a scientist named Wilbur Atwater pioneered the use of bomb calorimetry to measure food energy. Here's how it works:
Place food in a sealed chamber (the "bomb")
Surround it with water
Ignite the food and burn it completely to ash
Measure how much the water temperature rises
Calculate the heat energy released
This tells you how much heat energy is released when food combusts.
And we've been using this measurement—designed for burning food to ash—to predict what happens when food enters the intricate biological system of your body.
Your body is not a bomb calorimeter.
What Actually Happens in Your Body
When you eat 100 calories of almonds versus 100 calories of Skittles, your body doesn't ignite them and measure heat release.
Instead, thousands of simultaneous processes occur:
The almonds:
Are broken down by specific enzymes in your mouth, stomach, and intestines
Release nutrients gradually over several hours
Trigger satiety hormones (leptin, peptide YY, CCK)
Feed beneficial bacteria in your colon, which produce short-chain fatty acids
Require significant metabolic work to digest (20-30% of calories spent on processing)
Provide amino acids that become neurotransmitters
Supply magnesium that regulates over 300 enzymatic reactions
Deliver vitamin E that protects cell membranes from oxidative damage
Stabilize blood sugar through fiber, slowing glucose absorption
Signal to your genes (nutrigenomics) to reduce inflammation
The Skittles:
Are rapidly broken down with minimal enzymatic work
Flood your bloodstream with glucose within minutes
Spike insulin, signaling fat storage mode
Deliver fructose directly to your liver, which must process it (like alcohol)
Create advanced glycation end products (AGEs) that damage proteins
Feed opportunistic bacteria that produce inflammatory compounds
Require minimal metabolic work (5-10% of calories spent)
Trigger dopamine release in addiction pathways
Provide zero cofactors for the thousands of reactions your body needs
Signal to your genes to upregulate inflammatory pathways
Leave you hungry again within an hour despite the "energy"
Both release similar heat energy when burned in a bomb calorimeter.
Both do radically different things in your body.
Using calories to measure nutrition is like:
Using decibels to measure music quality. Yes, volume matters, but decibels can't tell you if you're listening to Mozart or a jackhammer. Both can hit 100 decibels. One is transcendent; one damages your ears.
Using square footage to measure home quality. Yes, size matters, but square feet can't tell you if your house is filled with toxic mold, has a leaking roof, or provides shelter and safety. A 2,000 sq ft mansion and a 2,000 sq ft condemned building have the same "measurement" but completely different outcomes for your health.
Calories measure heat energy release. They don't—and can't—measure:
Nutrient density
Hormonal responses
Inflammatory effects
Gut microbiome impact
Gene expression changes
Neurotransmitter production
Cellular repair capacity
Mitochondrial function
Oxidative stress
Metabolic health
We chose an easy-to-measure proxy (heat energy) and pretended it was the thing that actually matters (nutritional value).
When someone tells you "a calorie is a calorie" or "it's just calories in, calories out," they're making a category error.
They're saying: "100 decibels is 100 decibels, whether it's music or a jackhammer."
Technically true. Completely useless for determining what you should listen to.
The unit itself—the calorie—is incapable of measuring what we actually care about: Does this food support health or cause harm?
We're using the wrong units for the system we're trying to optimize.
What We Should Be Measuring Instead
If we actually wanted to measure food's impact on health, we'd need something like a "Metabolic Impact Score" that considers:
Nutrient density per calorie (vitamins, minerals, antioxidants)
Protein quality and quantity (essential amino acids, digestibility)
Fiber content (gut health, satiety, blood sugar regulation)
Glycemic impact (blood sugar spike and crash)
Inflammatory potential (omega-6:omega-3 ratio, AGEs, additives)
Satiety effect (how long until you're hungry again)
Thermic effect (metabolic cost of processing)
Microbiome impact (does it feed good or bad bacteria)
Hormonal response (insulin, leptin, ghrelin, cortisol)
Cellular building blocks (can your body use this to repair and build)
This would be complex. It would be hard to put on a label. It would be difficult to calculate.
But it would actually measure what matters.
Instead, we went with simple. We went with heat combustion. We went with the wrong units.
And now we're surprised that counting calories didn't solve obesity, diabetes, heart disease, or any of the metabolic disasters of the past 50 years.
The Hamster Wheel Generation
We're now multiple generations into the processed food experiment, and we're running faster than ever—tracking calories, hitting the gym, buying low-fat products, drinking diet sodas—while going absolutely nowhere in terms of actual health.
We're on the hamster wheel.
Obesity rates: climbing
Diabetes rates: climbing
Heart disease: still the leading cause of death
Cancer rates: climbing
Autoimmune conditions: climbing
Mental health disorders: climbing
Fertility: declining
Life expectancy: declining (in the US, for the first time in decades)
We're running very fast. We're counting every calorie. And we're getting sicker.
Because we're measuring speed when we should be measuring velocity.
Because we're focused on quantity when we should be focused on quality.
Because we're treating food like fuel for a bomb calorimeter when we should be treating it like information for a living system.
The Generational Question
So here's the question we need to ask ourselves:
If cats and monkeys become infertile and extremely sick after ten generations on processed foods, what generation are we on, and what are we willing to risk?
The first generation of Americans raised predominantly on processed foods (1960s-1970s) are now in their 60s and 70s. They're dealing with unprecedented rates of chronic disease.
The second generation (1980s-1990s) are now in their 30s-50s. They're seeing earlier onset of diseases that used to affect primarily the elderly.
The third generation (2000s-2010s) are children and young adults now. They're experiencing childhood obesity, Type 2 diabetes (once called "adult-onset"), fatty liver disease, and ADHD at rates never before seen in human history.
The fourth generation (2010s-2020s) are babies and toddlers now—consuming an average of 50 grams of added sugar per day before they're even three years old.
We don't need to wait until generation ten. We can see the trajectory now.
And the trajectory is not good.
The Answer Halloween Gives Us
Halloween makes the invisible visible. When you see a child's candy haul all at once, it's shocking. When you see the same amount of sugar spread across a year in cereals, yogurts, juices, and snacks, it's invisible.
But more importantly, Halloween gives us a clear comparison: candy versus real food.
Nobody argues that you could live on Halloween candy. Nobody claims that 2,000 calories of candy equals 2,000 calories of salmon, broccoli, and sweet potatoes.
Yet somehow, we're supposed to believe that calories are calories the rest of the year.
It's absurd.
And it's exactly the confusion the sugar industry wanted—going all the way back to the 1960s, when they paid Harvard scientists to shift focus from food quality (sugar bad, whole foods good) to food quantity (just count calories and reduce fat).
The calorie model was the perfect distraction.
Because it made nutrition seem like simple math: Eat less than you burn, lose weight. Eat more than you burn, gain weight. Food quality? Doesn't matter. Just count the numbers.
Except it does matter. Desperately. Profoundly. In every single cell of your body and every single outcome in your health.
100 calories of almonds is not the same as 100 calories of Skittles.
One sustains life. One damages it.
One provides building blocks, nutrients, and metabolic relief. One provides stress, inflammation, and work for your organs.
One points your velocity toward health. One spins your hamster wheel faster while you go nowhere.
The Simple Truth We Keep Avoiding
Here's the truth that the food industry, the diet industry, and even some nutrition scientists don't want you to focus on:
If you eat primarily whole, unprocessed foods—the foods humans ate for thousands of years before industrial processing—you will almost certainly:
Naturally regulate your calorie intake without counting
Maintain a healthy weight without extreme restriction
Have stable energy and mood throughout the day
Sleep better
Think more clearly
Have better digestion
Experience less inflammation
Reduce your risk of chronic disease
Feel satisfied after eating
If you eat primarily processed foods—engineered combinations of sugar, fat, salt, and additives—you will almost certainly:
Struggle to regulate your intake (they're designed to make you want more)
Fight your weight constantly
Experience energy crashes and cravings
Have disrupted sleep
Deal with brain fog and mood swings
Struggle with digestive issues
Experience chronic inflammation
Increase your risk of chronic disease
Feel hungry even after eating
This isn't about calories. It's about food.
The calorie model keeps us focused on quantity so we don't look too closely at quality—because if we did, we'd realize that most of what's in the middle aisles of the grocery store is monkey biscuits dressed up with "heart healthy" labels.
What This Means for Halloween—and Every Day After
So when someone says "it's all about calories in, calories out" they are basically insinuating that 100 calories of candy equals 100 calories of fruit.
You can tell them it does not work that way. The calorie model is dangerously incomplete. It's like navigating by speed alone without a compass. You might be moving, but you have no idea if you're heading toward health or away from it.
Quality determines direction. And direction determines destination.
We can also look as food as like a delivery system. Like amazon delivery boxes arriving at your door. It does not matter how many boxes arrive, if you are looking for food, let's say. If you need to eat, it totally matters what is in those boxes, not how many you get.
You may work off 100 calories of energy, but that has no relation to how that food is helping, or wreaking havoc, in your body.
Two people can eat identical calorie amounts—receive the same number of boxes, burn the same amount of energy—and have completely different health outcomes based on what was in those boxes.
The calorie model assumes that "burning it off" makes it neutral. But that's like saying it doesn't matter what chemicals you dump in a river as long as you run the water through a filtration plant. The filtration plant (your liver, kidneys, immune system) has a limited capacity. The damage accumulates regardless of the flow rate.
Upon eating the “worse” 100 calories, the body keeps sending the signal "I need more" when the deliveries arrive empty of nutrients. You can burn off the calories—you can work off the energy—but that doesn't change the fact that your cells are still starving for magnesium, for B vitamins, for amino acids, for the actual building blocks of life.
Food quality determines:
How many boxes you'll need to open before your body gets what it needs (whole foods satisfy; processed foods trigger endless searching)
What it costs to process each delivery (thermic effect varies by up to 6-fold)
Whether the contents build or damage (nutrients vs. inflammatory compounds)
Whether your "I've had enough" signal works (satiety hormones vs. dopamine hijacking)
What happens inside your body regardless of energy expended (cellular repair vs. oxidative stress)
The calorie-counting model gives people the illusion of control: "I ate 100 calories, I burned 100 calories, we're even."
But the metabolic reality is: You may be even on energy, but one delivery built muscle, stabilized hormones, fed beneficial gut bacteria, and provided antioxidants—while the other spiked insulin, stressed your liver, fed pathogenic bacteria, and triggered inflammation.
People who eat primarily processed foods consistently overconsume calories. The engineered combinations of sugar, fat, and salt override satiety signals. Their bodies keep demanding more boxes because what arrived was empty of actual nutrition.
A 2019 study published in Cell Metabolism by Kevin Hall at the NIH demonstrated this perfectly. People were put on either an unprocessed or ultra-processed diet, with both matched for calories, sugar, fat, fiber, and macronutrients. They could eat as much as they wanted—as many boxes as they wanted to open.
The result: People on the ultra-processed diet consumed an average of 500 more calories per day and gained weight. People on the unprocessed diet naturally ate less and lost weight.
Same available energy. Same number of boxes available. Different contents. Completely different outcomes.
Studies consistently show that people who eat primarily whole, unprocessed foods naturally regulate their calorie intake. They feel satisfied and stop eating. Their bodies recognize when the right contents have been delivered.
It is not about counting calories, it is about caring what those calories are made up of.
