I have always had this queasy feeling when I read newspaper columns
written by nutritionists.  Now, maybe, I can understand why....

University of Georgia’s College of Family and Consumer Sciences, said
many nutritionists aren’t even sure of the true origin of the Calorie
(or why it’s supposed to be capitalized).

not even the historians of nutrition,” he said.

Often, I get the sensation that nutritionists parrot things, rather than
understand things.

Anybody else had this feeling?

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http://www.uga.edu/news/artman/publish/061117_Calories.shtml

UGA professor finds that confusion about Calories is nothing new
[UGA = University of Georgia, Athens]
Nov 17, 2006, 15:26

Athens, Ga. – While enjoying a Thanksgiving dinner with friends and
family, most try to avoid thinking about the seemingly unending number
of Calories they’re consuming.

It probably never crosses their minds, however, to think about why food
is measured in Calories.

James L. Hargrove, associate professor of foods and nutrition in the
University of Georgia’s College of Family and Consumer Sciences, said
many nutritionists aren’t even sure of the true origin of the Calorie
(or why it’s supposed to be capitalized).

“We all teach this unit, and nobody knows where it came from, not even
the historians of nutrition,” he said.

After this realization, Hargrove began studying the origins of the
Calorie. He details his findings in a study to be published in the
December issue of the Journal of Nutrition.

Formally, a Calorie is a measure of the amount of energy required to
heat one kilogram of water one degree Celsius. It was first used in
engineering and physics, but eventually found its niche in nutrition,
where it is used to measure the amount of energy food contains.

Hargrove found that there’s some controversy about who “invented” the
Calorie. Some references show that two Frenchmen, P.A. Favre and J.T.
Silbermann, invented the Calorie in 1852. Other texts state that a
German physician, Julius Mayer, effectively invented the Calorie in a
study he published in 1848.

Hargrove credits the French chemist Nicholas Clement with the invention,
however, citing lecture notes from Clement that define the term as early
as 1819.

He credits Mayer with beginning a dialogue about food as an energy
source. Before Mayer’s time, people thought that energy was God-given;
they made no concrete connections between food they ate and the energy
on which their bodies ran.

Despite the confusion over who invented the unit, Hargrove notes that
the Calorie as a nutritional unit came to the U.S. by way of a man named
Wilbur Atwater in 1887. Shortly afterward, the science of nutrition
began to take hold in the U.S.

A popular early nutrition text published in 1918 by Lulu Hunt Peters
outlined the first methods of counting Calories. In her bestseller, Diet
and Health, with the Key to the Calories, Peters outlined 100-Calorie
portions of many foodstuffs and preached counting Calories as a way to
regulate weight.

Hargrove notes that one common misunderstanding about the Calorie is why
it is spelled with an uppercase “C” rather than a lowercase “c.” Owing
to the obscure origins of the measure, there was confusion about whether
or not a calorie was defined as the amount of heat required to raise one
kilogram of water one degree Celsius or one gram of water one degree
Celsius. As the Calorie became popular in nutrition, it became more
practical to measure the amount of kilograms. To denote this, a capital
“C” refers to a kilogram calorie, while a lowercase “c” refers to a gram
calorie.

"In food and daily energy, we use so much energy that if you measure in
gram calories, you're talking about two million calories a day," he
said. "And who wants to think about that?"