Definition:

CALORIE; symbol C.; a heat unit and food value unit; is that amount of
heat necessary to raise one pound of water 4 degrees Fahrenheit.


There is a good deal of effort expended by many semi-educated
individuals to discredit the knowledge of calories, saying that it is a
foolish food science, a fallacy, a fetish, and so forth.

They reason, or rather say, that because there are no calories in some
of the very vital elements of foods--the vitamines and the mineral
salts--therefore it is not necessary to know about them. They further
argue that their grandfathers never heard of calories and they got along
all right. That grandfather argument always enrages my mortal mind.


Now you know that a calorie is a unit of measuring heat and food. It is
not heat, not food; simply a unit of measure. And as food is of supreme
importance, certainly a knowledge of how it should be measured is also
of supreme importance.


You should know and also use the word calorie as frequently, or more
frequently, than you use the words foot, yard, quart, gallon, and so
forth, as measures of length and of liquids. Hereafter you are going to
eat calories of food. Instead of saying one slice of bread, or a piece
of pie, you will say 100 Calories of bread, 350 Calories of pie.

The following is the way the calorie is determined:

An apparatus known as the bomb calorimeter has two chambers, the inner,
which contains the dry food to be burned, say a definite amount of
sugar, and an outer, which is filled with water. The food is ignited
with an electric connection and burned. This heat is transferred to the
water. When one pound of water is raised 4 degrees Fahrenheit, the
amount of heat used is arbitrarily chosen as the unit of heat, and is
called the Calorie.

Food burned (oxydized) in the body has been proved to give off
approximately the same amount of heat or energy as when burned in the
calorimeter.

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