DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CALORIES AND KILOCALORIES

Labels use either of these two measures. Know your differences to avoid confusion

Those who are used to taking care of their diet and check the labels of nutritional information of the foods they consume will surely have observed that in some labels they speak of calories, while in others they refer to kilocalories.

Even so, most likely they have not worried much about the matter and have assumed that both measures amount the same. So common is this error, which is sometimes called calories, when in fact it is kilocalories, or vice versa.

Given that a healthy diet is based on the regulation of the amounts of energy consumed, this can be highly damaging. Calories and kilocalories are not the same.

Although both are units of measure to determine the energy contained in food, you cannot fall into the error, since, like one kilogram equals one thousand grams, one kilocalorie equals one thousand calories.

The official method to measure the energy that food contributes to the body is that of kilocalories. Because of this, nutritional recommendations on the amount of energy the body should consume daily should be indicated in kilocalories.

For example, a man needs to ingest between 2,000 and 2,500 kilocalories per day, and in the case of women it will be between 1,500 and 2,000 kilocalories.

Another problem in the matter of calories and kilocalories is the fact that kilocalories can be mentioned as “Kcal.” or as “Cal.” (with capital “C”). When you see “Cal” you can easily think of calories, when in reality the meaning of calories need to be written with a lowercase letter “cal.”,

For example, if a dessert claims to have 300 Cal., It is not 300 calories, which would represent a tiny 0.015% of the recommendation of 2,000 kilocalories daily. Actually those 300 Cal. are 300 kilocalories, (300,000 calories), and represents 15% of the total kilocalories that should be consumed in one day.