kcal and cal

[philip456]

I've been reading Roy Talyor's latest book. His 1-2-3 or Newcastle diet recommends starting off with 700-800 calories a day or 600 using liquid meal-replacement drinks.

Looking at the Almased powdered drinks. They are 230,000 calories per serving, when mixed with water and more when mixed with milk.

How can this be so?

One drink serving coming out at around 300 days of caloires!!!

The NHS weight loss plan is 1,900,000 cal per day for men and 1,400,000 cal per day for women. If this is so, how can Prof. Roy Talyor suggest we survive on 600-800 cal a day?

 

[Bruce Stephens]

How can this be so?

You're right that it's (unnecessarily) confusing.

NHS Understanding calories

This information will appear under the "Energy" heading. The calorie content is often given in kcals, which is short for kilocalories, and also in kJ, which is short for kilojoules.​

​

A kilocalorie is another word for what's commonly called a calorie, so 1,000 calories will be written as 1,000kcals.​

 

[Lucyr]

Are you reading the calories in KJ? Says 228 on the website.

 

[philip456]

I've been reading that a kcal is 1000 calories.

What you are saying is that 1 kcal is 1 calorie.

That's like saying that a km or kilometre is the same a metre.

Doesn't make any sense. But if that's the way it is I'll learn that a kcal is the same as a cal.

 

[Bruce Stephens]

Doesn't make any sense. But if that's the way it is I'll learn that a kcal is the same as a cal.

Apparently that's the convention: "calorie" can mean kcal. So there's two different measures written on packaging, kcal (commonly known as calorie) and kJ short for kilo Joules.

I guess for cal, kcal, calorie the assumption is that the context avoids too much confusion. (I don't know the history of the terms.)

 

[EllsBells]

It's the other way around. That kcal is frequently referred to as cal only even when people mean kcal.

 

[trophywench]

Ah well of course calories have always been kcal in truth, but so many noughts on the end it wasn't convenient to quote them as 'thousands' if you see what I mean, so they just called em calories and because us lot trying to lose weight or whatever weren't all nutritional scientists - we didn't even know that was the case. Then they decided they ought to be truthful - hence on UK food packaging they now always say (a number) of kcals. Can't speak for foreign food packaging - although the EU do the same as the UK on theirs.

So if it's 1 kcal and summat else is 100kcal, the first thing is obviously lower and the second higher.

 

[everydayupsanddowns]

Yup I have always found this confusing too.

In my head I generally think of them as being ’calories, an abbreviation for kcal. And as usual, people dont (sic) know what to do with the apostrophe, so miss it out