What Do Calories Taste Like?

Many weight conscious people are concerned about their daily calorie intake. But what does a calorie taste like--sweet, sour or salty? This, of course, is a redicules question because a calorie doesn't have a taste because a it is not a substance, but a unit of measure. In this nutritional context, it is the measure of the energy content of a food. Technically, a calorie is defined as the amount of heat energy it takes to raise the temperature of one gram (about 1/30th of an ounce) one degree Celsius. A nutritional calorie is defined to be 1000 times bigger (kilocalorie) than the standard one and is frequently capitalized Calorie.

All forms of energy can be converted from one form to another--heat to electrical, for example, or electrical to light or mechanical energy. Take a jelly bean, for example. It weighs about 3 grams and is almost 100% sugar. If one gram of sugar is completely burned, it would produce 4.1 Calories of heat energy. Therefore, one jelly bean is equivalent to 12.3 Calories. This is enough energy to keep a 60 watt light bulb operating for 14.3 minutes. By comparison, a can of beer or a donut will keep the lamp lit for nearly three hours. The Calories and thus the energy in a quarter pound hamburger will keep the lamp burning for almost 20 hours.

All human activities expend energy--some activities more than others. Just sleeping uses some 1.2 Calories per minute, standing 2.0, walking 3.7, bicycling 7.7 and swimming a walloping 13 Calories per minute. As food is metabolized (burned) in our bodies, the energy released drives the chemistry of our muscles to produce mechanical motion. Some of the energy, of course, is lost to the environment in the form of heat.  That is why we are harm.