More than judging a food based on its calorie content, you have to
judge based on what those calories are going to do to your hormones.

I've been studying chemistry longer than my teenage daughter's friends
have been alive...and to this day, most people still have no idea
what a calorie is or what it means to their body.

A calorie is simply a unit of measure – like horsepower – that defines
how much energy is generated from a given food when burned. To measure this
energy, a device known as a calorimeter is used.

However, unlike a calorimeter, the human body is quite complex and
doesn’t treat all calories the same. Not to mention, it looks way better
in a bikini!

While some foods can have the same caloric content, they can
have vastly different effects on your hormones. Therefore, you can’t
measure whether a food is good or bad, simply based on “how many
calories” it has.

Otherwise, you're pretty much screwed...here's why.

A gram of carbohydrates has about four calories, while a gram
of naturally occurring fat has about nine calories. Based largely on this
observation, the USDA advised the world that fat is bad and converted most
of us into grain-eating “carbivores.”

That’s about the time our national health got ugly... along with the
scenery
at the beach.

Since grains - and most low calorie foods - don’t satisfy hunger for very
long,
snacking is necessary to stave off cravings. Therefore, you end up
overeating.

In time, your internal biochemistry becomes a whirlwind of toxic, fat
inflating hormones when you choose low calorie, high-carbohydrate foods.

Those are the wrong calories to be counting.

Rather than choosing foods based on low calories, you need to choose foods
that provide nutrient-rich calories that promote the production of hormones
that burn fat, build muscle and extend functional lifespan - a condition that I
call hormone intelligence.

These are calories that come from high-calorie foods like healthy fats,
non-sweet complex carbohydrates, and “complete proteins.” Once you learn
what each of these are, you can calculate how many of them you need.

(Even too much of the right calories can wreck your physique.)

Healthy fat calories can be obtained from coconut oil (in tea and coffee or
used for cooking), cod-liver oil (this has the omega-3 fats known as EPA
and DHA with the added value of naturally occurring vitamin D), olive oil,
bacon, avocados (omega-9), eggs (raw, scrambled, hard-boiled, whatever), fish,
nuts, seeds, pastured pork and poultry and humane-raised beef.

So in sum, count calories based on the ones that have a positive
effect on your hormones, not the ones that are simply "low-cal."

Dare to live young,

The People's Chemist