Science Framed Obesity Around Calories Because Calorimeters Were the Only Available Tool
Gary Taubes · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · Nov 30, 2017 · at 36:52
Gary Taubes outlines the historical origins of the 'calories in, calories out' framework during early calorimetry research.
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“Nutrition science from the 18 sixties to the 19 twenties was completely dominated by, as all sciences are, by what they could measure, the technologies available to make observations, and all they had were they had devices called calorimeters, Where they can measure the energy content of a food, and then they can measure the energy expended by humans by putting them in these room size calorimeters, or dogs, And then they had, ah, they could do experiments with animals where you know, give them vitamin or mineral deficiencies and see what kind of diseases manifest, so from there. So all of nutrition science was calorimetry, energy in and energy out, and vitamins and minerals, and when people started talking about what the cause of obesity might be, it made absolutely perfect sense to think in terms of calories, because that's all they could look at.”
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