ArticlePublic health nutrition2015
How calorie-focused thinking about obesity and related diseases may mislead and harm public health. An alternative.
Article in Public health nutrition, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 33 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
33 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 70 citations in OpenAlex.
- Associations of overweight and gestational diabetes mellitus with free sugars from solid and liquid sources: cross-sectional and nested case-control analyses.BMC public health · 2021Pooled it
- Amino Acids as Metabokines in Hypercatabolic States: Rethinking Nutritional Protein-Based Strategies Beyond Caloric Support.Nutrients · 2026Review
- Defining the guiding principles of weight-inclusive nutrition education.Frontiers in public health · 2026Article
- N-of-1 health optimization: Digital monitoring of biomarker dynamics to gamify adherence to metabolic switching.PNAS nexus · 2024Article
- Prevalence and Risk Factors of Comorbid Obesity in Chinese Patients with Bipolar Disorder.Diabetes, metabolic syndrome and obesity : targets and therapy · 2023Article
- The degree of food processing can influence serum fatty acid and lipid profiles in women with severe obesity.Frontiers in nutrition · 2023Article
- Competing paradigms of obesity pathogenesis: energy balance versus carbohydrate-insulin models.European journal of clinical nutrition · 2022Review
- "Maybe a little bit of guilt isn't so bad for the overall health of an individual": a mixed-methods exploration of young adults' experiences with calorie labelling.BMC public health · 2022Article
- Comparisons of Four Diet Quality Indexes to Define Single Meal Healthfulness.Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics · 2022Observational
- Phenomics, genomics of oil palm (Physiology and molecular biology of plants : an international journal of functional plant biology · 2021Review
- Association of Nutrient Patterns and Their Relation with Obesity in Iranian Adults: a Population Based Study.Clinical nutrition research · 2021Article
- Diabetes, Therapeutic Inertia, and Patients' Medication Experience.Diabetes spectrum : a publication of the American Diabetes Association · 2020Article
- The calorie counter-intuitive effect of restaurant menu calorie labelling.Canadian journal of public health = Revue canadienne de sante publique · 2019Article
- Perspective: Public Health Nutrition Policies Should Focus on Healthy Eating, Not on Calorie Counting, Even to Decrease Obesity.Advances in nutrition (Bethesda, Md.) · 2019Article
- Overeating, caloric restriction and breast cancer risk by pathologic subtype: the EPIGEICAM study.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Auricular Acupuncture Associated with Reduced Waist Circumference in Overweight Women-A Randomized Controlled Trial.Evidence-based complementary and alternative medicine : eCAM · 2019Article
- Food Insecurity Moderates the Acute Effect of Subjective Socioeconomic Status on Food Consumption.Frontiers in psychology · 2019Article
- Helpful or harmful? The comparative value of self-weighing and calorie counting versus intuitive eating on the eating disorder symptomology of college students.Eating and weight disorders : EWD · 2018Article
- Genetic Evidence That Carbohydrate-Stimulated Insulin Secretion Leads to Obesity.Clinical chemistry · 2018Article
- Prospective associations between diet quality and body mass index in disadvantaged women: the Resilience for Eating and Activity Despite Inequality (READI) study.International journal of epidemiology · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Prevailing thinking about obesity and related diseases holds that quantifying calories should be a principal concern and target for intervention. Part of this thinking is that consumed calories - regardless of their sources - are equivalent; i.e. 'a calorie is a calorie'. The present commentary discusses various problems with the idea that 'a calorie is a calorie' and with a primarily quantitative focus on food calories. Instead, the authors argue for a greater qualitative focus on the sources of calories consumed (i.e. a greater focus on types of foods) and on the metabolic changes that result from consuming foods of different types. In particular, the authors consider how calorie-focused thinking is inherently biased against high-fat foods, many of which may be protective against obesity and related diseases, and supportive of starchy and sugary replacements, which are likely detrimental. Shifting the focus to qualitative food distinctions, a central argument of the paper is that obesity and related diseases are problems due largely to food-induced physiology (e.g. neurohormonal pathways) not addressable through arithmetic dieting (i.e. calorie counting). The paper considers potential harms of public health initiatives framed around calorie balance sheets - targeting 'calories in' and/or 'calories out' - that reinforce messages of overeating and inactivity as underlying causes, rather than intermediate effects, of obesity. Finally, the paper concludes that public health should work primarily to support the consumption of whole foods that help protect against obesity-promoting energy imbalance and metabolic dysfunction and not continue to promote calorie-directed messages that may create and blame victims and possibly exacerbate epidemics of obesity and related diseases.
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.