Food Calories Quotes & Sayings

Brillat-Savarin claimed to have seen the vicar of Bregnier eat the following within forty-five minutes: a bowl of soup, two dishes of boiled beef, a leg of mutton, a handsome capon, a generous salad, a ninety-degree wedge from a good-sized white cheese, a bottle of wine, and a carafe of water. If Brillat-Savarin was not exaggerating, the amount of food eaten by the vicar in less than an hour would have provided enough calories for a day or more. It is hard to imagine a wild chimpanzee achieving such a feat. — Richard W. Wrangham

In hunter-gatherer times, [the amount of energy human beings use each day] was about 2,500 calories, all of it food. That is the daily energy intake of a common dolphin. A modern human being uses 31,000 calories a day, most of it in the form of fossil fuel. That is the intake of a pilot whale. And the average American uses six times that-as much as a sperm whale. We have become, in other words, different from the people we used to be.... We've ... gotten bigger. We appear to be the same species, with stomachs of the same size, but we aren't.1o — Daniel Bodansky

When my generation of women walked away from the kitchen we were escorted down that path by a profiteering industry that knew a tired, vulnerable marketing target when they saw it. "Hey, ladies," it said to us, "go ahead, get liberated. We'll take care of dinner." They threw open the door and we walked into a nutritional crisis and genuinely toxic food supply. If you think toxic is an exaggeration, read the package directions for handling raw chicken from a CAFO. We came a long way, baby, into bad eating habits and collaterally impaired family dynamics. No matter what else we do or believe, food remains at the center of every culture. Ours now runs on empty calories. — Barbara Kingsolver

We take a certain sick pride in the fact that we know the caloric and fat content of every possible food on the planet, and have an understandable disdain for nutritionists who attempt to tell us the caloric content of anything, when we are the gods of caloric content and have delusions of nutritional omniscience, when said nutritionist will attempt to explain that the average woman needs a daily diet of 2,000 or more calories when we ourselves have been doing JUST FUCKING FINE on 500. — Marya Hornbacher

Most guys have about 73 calories of shopping energy, and once these calories are gone, they're gone for the day - if not the week - and can't be regenerated simply by having an Orange Julius at the Food Fair. — Douglas Coupland

The reason is that you eat too many foods that are high in "calories," which are little units that measure how good a particular food tastes. Fudge, for example, has a great many calories, whereas celery, which is not really a food at all but a member of the plywood family, provided by Mother Nature so that mankind would have a way to get onion dip into his mouth at parties, has none. — Dave Barry

... a health drink company called Fuel, founded by a former tank commander in the British Army and an extreme-sports enthusiast, offers a liquid fry-up combining the flavors of bacon, sausage, poached egg, fried tomatoes, baked beans, mushrooms, toast, salt and pepper, and brown sauce. It's only 230 calories, and it packs twenty grams of protein (assuming you can keep it down). — Erin Moore

The food industry burns nearly a fifth of all the petroleum consumed in the United States (about as much as automobiles do). Today it takes between seven and ten calories of fossil fuel energy to deliver one calorie of food energy to an American plate. — Michael Pollan

Starvation was the first indication of my self-discipline. I was devoted to anorexia. I went the distance of memorizing the calorie content within every bite of food while calculating the exact amount of exercise I needed to burn double my consumption. I was luckily young enough to mask my excessive exercise with juvenile hyperactivity. Nobody thought twice about the fact that I was constantly rollerblading, biking, and running for hours in stifling summer humidity. I learned to cut my food into tiny bites and move it around my plate. I read that standing burned more calories than sitting, so I refused to watch television without doing crunches, leg lifts, or at least walking in place. When socially forced to soldier through a movie, I tapped my foot in desperation to knock out about seventy-five extra calories. From age eleven to twelve, I dropped forty pounds and halted the one period I'd had. — Maggie Young

I try to think of food like fuel. I don't look at calories; I just look at ingredients. If my body were an engine, what would make it run? What would make it perform at its highest level? — Nikki Reed

Every time the good giants try to cut back on salt, sugar, fat calories, inevitably Wall Street raises its hand and is looking at the sales figures and the revenue and saying, 'Thou shalt not result in any loss of profit.' There's huge continuing pressure on the food companies. — Michael Moss

Every year, the average American eats as much as 33 pounds of cheese. That's up to 60,000 calories and 3,100 grams of saturated fat. So why do we eat so much cheese? Mainly it's because the government is in cahoots with the processed food industry. — Michael Moss

If the things we eat have been processed - manipulated, broken apart, adulterated, with most of the fiber (and nutrients) thrown away - then we end up consuming something that's food, technically speaking, but lacks many of the health benefits that eating is supposed to bring us. We get calories - which we need to survive, of course - but little else. None of the nutrition. As Dr. Fuhrman puts it, we end up mechanically full but nutritionally starved. If we do that often enough, we will absolutely harm ourselves at the cellular level. Over time, that may bring about some chronic condition. — Darin Olien

You know how we're thinking about food these days, less in terms of carbs and calories than in terms of color, vivacity, and life force? We can do the same with time. Then it's no longer about having enough of it but about infusing color and vivacity and life force into every moment. (279) — Victoria Moran

Everyone was always hungry. The poorer you were, the hungrier you were, and with the hunger came weakness and irritability. It became difficult to think clearly and you needed to think clearly to work out how to survive the next day, how to get food. You were sure you could still work if you could find work, and you could look for it if only you could eat. But how were you going to get food, for yourself, for your children, for your wife or husband, for your parents? There were simply too many people within those walls for the calories that were let in. How were you to get food when there just wasn't enough of it? What were you going to have to do? With hunger of this severity came fatigue, a weakness that transcended tiredness and permeated your sinews and bones. As your limbs got ever lighter, they felt progressively heavier with each new day. — Elliot Perlman

So much of the world's suffering results from the sinful action or inaction of ourselves and others. For example, people look at a famine and wonder where God is, but the world produces enough food for each person to have 3,000 calories a day. It's our own irresponsibility and self-centeredness that prevents people from getting fed. — Lee Strobel

Our culture tries to convince us on just about every front that more is better. More is a sign of wealth, luxury, power. Gone are the days when meals were moments of connection and conversation; now it's all about consumption and calories. — Mary DeTurris Poust

You get food from Costco. Those big muffins, maybe? My sister says they've got a thousand calories a piece. — Gabrielle Zevin

It's not that I'm not social. I'm social enough. But the tools you guys create actually manufacture unnaturally extreme social needs. No one needs the level of contact you're purveying. It improves nothing. It's not nourishing. It's like snack food. You know how they engineer this food? They scientifically determine precisely how much salt and fat they need to include to keep you eating. You're not hungry, you don't need the food, it does nothing for you, but you keep eating these empty calories. This is what you're pushing. Same thing. Endless empty calories, but the digital-social equivalent. And you calibrate it so it's equally addictive. — Dave Eggers

Adults who could digest raw milk had an excellent source of food on the hoof. Cattle could go on turning grass into milk for years before they were slaughtered for beef. It has been proposed that lactase persistence was the genetic edge that allowed the dairy pastoralist Indo-Europeans to spread. Dairy farming produces five times as many calories per acre as raising cattle for slaughter.61 The protein and calcium of milk certainly build bones. Prehistoric dairy farmers tended to be taller than other farmers.62 — Jean Manco

10. Calories count in New York City. The Big Apple recently adopted a law that requires fast-food restaurants with at least fifteen outlets in the city to post, in prominent places, the calories of each of their food items so that customers can make informed choices. — Richard H. Thaler

If I wanted to get my arms as big as I could possibly get them, I would probably do around 20 sets of 4 exercises and 5 sets each for the triceps and 20 sets for the biceps per workout 3 times a week. That would be around 60 sets of triceps and 60 sets of biceps work per week. I would keep the reps between 6 and 8 and I would do all basic movements where I'd handle as heavy a weight as possible. I'd consume nutritious food that had calories in and just flat out eat! — Bill Pearl

Feinstein examined the efficacy of various obesity treatments in a lengthy review in the Journal of Chronic Diseases, he dismissed exercise in a single paragraph. "There has been ample demonstration that exercise is an ineffective method of increasing energy output," Feinstein noted, "since it takes far too much activity to burn up enough calories for a significant weight loss. In addition, physical exertion may evoke a desire for food so that the subsequent intake of calories may exceed what was lost during the exercise. — Gary Taubes

Don't count calories, don't hate carbs, don't go to the Stone Age. Simply eat real food, healthy food, and find ways to love every bit of food and the health that results. It will become a lifelong habit and you can leave the yo-yoing behind. — Thomas M. Campbell II

Food imaginatively and lovingly prepared, and eaten in good company, warms the being with something more than the mere intake of calories. I cannot conceive of cooking for friends or family, under reasonable conditions, as being a chore. — Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

We've gone through some kind of a metamorphosis over the years. We've made food very easy to get calories from." He talked about the greater degree to which we refine foods now; an example is how we mill away the bran from brown rice and whole wheat flour. As a result the food is "light, it's white, it's very easy to swallow. It doesn't obstruct you in any way. It's easy to get a lot of calories without a lot of chewing."
Because this kind of food disappears down our throats so quickly after the first bite, it readily overrides the body's signals that should tell us "I'm full. — David A. Kessler

Researchers found that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of potato chips and cookies; spent on a whole food like carrots, the same dollar buys only 250 calories. On the beverage aisle, you can buy 875 calories of soda for a dollar, or 170 calories of fruit juice from concentrate. — Michael Pollan

In many places in the developed world, we eat or waste probably twice as many food calories as we really need. We're wasteful of food. We ship all over the world. We're now realizing that generating the energy to ship the food around the world is also ruining our climate. — Nina Fedoroff

Men have special needs too: for example, a man generally needs a higher daily intake of calories than a woman. But this has never been though of as a sign of men's inferiority to women; if anything, it is a sign of strength and an entitlement to extra food. — Jonathan Wolff

A human on a bicycle is more efficient (in calories expended per pound and per mile) than a train, truck, airplane, boat, automobile, motorcycle, skateboard, canoe, or jet pack. Not only that, bicycling is more efficient than walking, which takes three times as many calories per mile. In fact, pound for pound, a person on a bike can go farther on a calorie of food than a gazelle can running, a salmon swimming, or an eagle flying. — Sightline Institute

Yes, part of the problem is junk food. There's more of it, and it's more alluring than ever. But nonjunk food is a bigger problem. It isn't as flavorful as it used to be, which has the inverse effect of making junk food yet more enticing. Even worse, we're turning real food into junk food.Thanks to its off-putting insipidness, we coat it in calories, drench it in dressing, and dust it in synthetic flavor. The more bland it becomes, the harder we try to make it seem real. — Mark Schatzker

While 45 percent of the land on earth is used to raise animals and food to feed them, it is estimated that only 5 percent is used to grow plant-based foods consumed directly by humans. This 5 percent, though, supplies 80 percent of the calories consumed by humans.15 — Richard Oppenlander

Very simply, we subsidize high-fructose corn syrup in this country, but not carrots. While the surgeon general is raising alarms over the epidemic of obesity, the president is signing farm bills designed to keep the river of cheap corn flowing, guaranteeing that the cheapest calories in the supermarket will continue to be the unhealthiest. — Michael Pollan

Weight Watchers points is a beautiful system for someone who is absentminded about food. They aren't the greatest for someone who has had eating disorders all her life. The world became numbers to me and I was doing more math than I ever had before. I got off Weight Watchers and went back to just counting calories. The world became different kinds of numbers, the old, familiar kind. This is how I eat now. The world is still numbers, but it is algebra, not calculus. — Melissa Broder

Wet milling (to produce starch) is an energy-intensive way to make food; for every calorie of processed food it produces, another ten calories of fossil fuel energy are burned. — Michael Pollan

Too many people just eat to consume calories. Try dining for a change. — John Walters

Culture alone cannot explain the phenomena of such high rates of eating disorders.
Eating disorders are complex, but what they all seem to have in common is the ability to distract women from the memories, sensations, and experience of the sexual abuse through starving, bingeing, purging, or exercising. They keep the focus on food, body image, weight, fat, calories, diets, miles, and other factors that women focus on during the course of an eating disorder. These disorders also have the ability to numb a woman from the overwhelming emotions resulting from the sexual abuse - especially loss of control, terror, and shame about her body. Women often have a combination of eating disorders in in their history. Some women are anorexic during one period of their life, bulimic during another, and compulsive eaters at yet another stage. — Karen A. Duncan

Books educate and inspire, and they soothe souls
like comfort food without the calories. — Elizabeth Berg

Books are like confort food without the calories — Elizabeth Berg

Ecology also teaches that all life on earth can be viewed as a competition among species for the solar energy captured by green plants and stored in the form of complex carbon molecules. A food chain is a system for passing those calories on to species that lack the pant's unique ability to synthesize them from sunlight. — Michael Pollan

Normally the only decoration in there was on Sham Harga's vest and the food was good solid stuff for a cold morning, all calories and fat and protein and maybe a vitamin crying softly because it was all alone. Now — Terry Pratchett

Food is like a torture device because hiking 47 miles a day is hard enough. And then you're trying to get down 6,000 calories a day. Every hour, I needed a snack, every few hours I had to take in a meal and it's just not food, it's fuel. You're not enjoying it - you're seriously shoving it in your mouth and following it with water, juice or Gatorade. — Jennifer Pharr Davis

Eating a piece of meat, at its most efficient, we could say is like throwing away six times that amount of food every time you eat it because you're recycling all those calories through it. I know a lot of people who came to this issue not through animal welfare but through wastefulness. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Since the body can't break down resistant starch, it slips through the digestive track without ever turning into calories of glucose - a particular boon, we're told, for diabetics. When fake sugars and fake fats are joined by fake starches, the food industry will at long last have overcome the dilemma of the fixed stomach: whole meals you can eat as often or as much of as you like, since this food will leave no trace. Meet the ultimate - the utterly elastic! - industrial eater. — Michael Pollan

If I eat mindlessly while watching television, reading, or talking with someone else, I can go through an entire meal without tasting the food, without even noticing that I've been eating. The plate is empty but I didn't enjoy the food - I had all of the calories and little of the pleasure. — Dean Ornish

Are you calling for help?" Sophie asked when he had closed the phone.
Saint-Germain shook his head. "Ordering breakfast. I'm famished." He jerked his thumb back in the direction of the Eiffel Tower, which was still erupting fireworks. "Creating something like that- if you pardon the pun- burns a lot of calories. — Michael Scott

The food was good solid stuff for a cold morning, all calories and fat and protein and maybe a vitamin crying softly because it was all alone. — Terry Pratchett

Food, in the end, in our own tradition, is something holy. It's not about nutrients and calories. It's about sharing. It's about honesty. It's about identity. — Louise Fresco

And here is the shocking plot twist: as farmers produced those extra calories, the food industry figured out how to get them into the bodies of people who didn't really want to eat 700 more calories a day. — Barbara Kingsolver

How is it that food STILL contains calories that make you gain weight in the 21st CENTURY?! It's like scientists aren't even trying! — Tanya Masse

We in the richest societies have too many calories even as we starve for beautiful, fresh food; we have overly large houses but lack spaces that truly embody our individuality and connectedness; media surround us everywhere while we starve for authentic communication. We are offered entertainment every second of the day but lack the chance to play. In the ubiquitous world of money, we hunger for all that is intimate, personal and unique. — Charles Eisenstein

Corn is an efficient way to get energy calories off the land and soybeans are an efficient way of getting protein off the land, so we've designed a food system that produces a lot of cheap corn and soybeans resulting in a lot of cheap fast food. — Michael Pollan

My whole day revolves around food. If you think you've won the day, only because you haven't eaten over 1,000 calories, you know that things are off-kilter. That's not a healthy way to be thinking. — Jonathan Tucker

IF you remember every word in this book, your memory will have recorded about two million pieces of information: the order in your brain will have increased by about two million units. However, while you have been reading the book, you will have converted at least a thousand calories of ordered energy, in the form of food, into disordered energy, in the form of heat that you lose to the air around you by convection and sweat. This will increase the disorder of the universe by about twenty million million million million units - or about ten million million million times the increase in order in your brain - and that's if you remember everything in this book. — Stephen Hawking

The difficult truth is that the basic law of thermodynamics still holds: When we eat more calories than we expend, we gain weight. When we burn more energy through physical activity or exercise than we take in from food and drinks, we lose weight. — Thich Nhat Hanh

Junk food, empty calories and carbs are the Big Data of the masses — Karl Marx

A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that restricting calories by 30 percent significantly increased life span in monkeys.27 The experimental diet, while still providing adequate nourishment, slowed monkeys' metabolism and reduced their body temperatures, changes similar to those in the long-lived thin mice. Decreased levels of triglycerides and increased HDL (the good) cholesterol were also observed. Studies over the years, on many different species of animals, have confirmed that those animals that were fed less lived longest. In fact, allowing an animal to eat as much food as it desires can reduce its life span by as much as one-half. — Joel Fuhrman

which food has more protein - broccoli or steak? You were wrong if you thought steak. Steak has only 6.4 grams of protein per 100 calories and broccoli has 11.1 grams, almost twice as much.21 Keep in mind that most of the calories in meat come from fat; green vegetables are mostly protein. (All calories must come from fat, carbohydrate, or protein.) — Joel Fuhrman

At one point I had to shove as much food in my body as possible to pack on calories. My trainer wanted me to do six meals a day and not go two hours without eating. If I would cheat on eating one day, I could tell - I'd drop a few pounds. — Taylor Lautner

It is food - we now know that food is information, not just calories, and that it can upgrade your biologic software. The majority of chronic disease is primarily a food borne illness. We ate ourselves into this problem and we have to eat ourselves out of it. — Mark Hyman, M.D.

To unleash the powers of your P-Spot you need to let go of the controlling rules and restrictions of traditional diets, one Naughty Step at a time. You need to get out of your head and into your sensual, genius body - learn to feel it, trust it, revel in it. And you need to eat for Pleasure, which means eating for Quality - and by definition, health too. We are born Pleasure-seekers; it's not just the calories from food that fill us up, but the Pleasure we get from eating them. When you eat for pleasure your P-spot purrs, metabolism turns on, all senses are heightened, stress levels drop, food tastes more flavorful and its nutritional value soars. Activate your P-Spot and you'll balance your appetite - and aid weight loss - too. — Melissa Milne

If you're cooking food, you don't have to count calories. — Michael Pollan

I add a lot of citrus to my food and I think that flavors it. And, to me, that what makes it healthier, lower in fat, lower in calories. It adds lots of flavor. Spices, of course. But citrus is definitely kind of my go-to to season and really to really make those flavors, make that food come alive. — Cat Cora

The great anxious focus on the minutiae of appetite - on calories and portion size and what's going into the body versus what's being expended, on shoes and hair and abs of steel - keeps the larger, more fearsome questions of desire blurred and out of focus. American women spend approximately $1 million every hour on cosmetics. This may or may not say something about female vanity, but it certainly says something about female energy, where it is and is not focused. Easier to worry about the body than the soul, easier to fit the self into the narrow slots of identity our culture offers to women than to create one ... that allows for the expression of all passions, the satisfaction of all appetites. The great preoccupation with things like food and shopping and appearance, in turn, is less of a genuine focus on hunger - indulging it, understanding it, making decisions about it - than it is a monumental distraction from hunger. — Caroline Knapp

Food: Part of the spiritual expression of the French, and I do not believe that they have ever heard of calories. — Beverley Baxter

I think steak is the ultimate comfort food, and if you're going out for one, that isn't the time to scrimp on calories or quality. — Tom Colicchio

We'd do better-if it were possible-just to eat the oil directly. For example, it takes 127 calories of fuel to fly in each calorie of iceberg lettuce from the United States to the UK. According to one estimate, the US food system consumes ten times more fossil energy than it produces in food energy. With — Mark Lynas

Humans look just like livestock now. We achieve a state of buttery plumpness before we've even reached sexual maturity. We experience powerful cravings for food that is slowly making us sick. We are...programmed to eat the wrong food. We aren't born calorie zombies, but that's what we have become. — Mark Schatzker

A one-pound box of prewashed lettuce contains 80 calories of food energy. According to Cornell ecologist David Pimentel, growing, chilling, washing, packaging, and transporting that box of organic salad to a plate on the East Coast takes more than 4,600 calories of fossil fuel energy, or 57 calories of fossil fuel for every calorie of food. — Michael Pollan

As of now, it takes more than a calorie of fossil fuel to produce a calorie of food energy for humans - somewhere between four and ten calories of fossil fuel for a calorie of food. The fossil fuel is in both the fertilizer and the pesticides, and it's essential to the machinery needed to plant, harvest, process, and transport grain. All told, an acre of corn drinks about fifty gallons of oil. — Lierre Keith

One consequential change is that people used to get most of their calories at breakfast and midday, with only the evening top-up at suppertime. Now those intakes are almost exactly reversed. Most of us consume the bulk
a sadly appropriate word here
of our calories in the evening and take them to bed with us, a practice that doesn't do any good at all. — Bill Bryson

Well, Kessa, I am glad to see that you're taking your body seriously. I shudder when I see the girls leaving class and heading for the nearest hamburger, coke, and French fry station.The thought of them pouring all those dead calories into themselves makes me want to cry. You'd think after a rigorous dance class they'd have more respect for their bodies. — Steven Levenkron

In a time when many people are looking to cut calories, reduce food intake, cut food costs, and lower their bodyweight, bodybuilders are looking to pour it on. — Robert Cheeke

Sugar-free ice pops are an invention of God. They hardly have any calories since they're mostly water. I eat about 15 pops every two days. — Gene Simmons

To eat corn directly is to consume all the energy in the corn, but when you feed that corn to an animal, 90% of its energy is lost... what this means is that the amount of food energy lost in the making of something like a Chicken McNugget could feed a great many more children than just mine, and that behind the 4,510 calories in our meal, tens of thousand corn calories could have been used to feed many more people. — Michael Pollan

Women's evolution at this time is demanding that we go beneath the obsession about counting calories and losing weight, and reclaim our sacredness as women, our right to our own voices and our ability to make our own choices. Until we can do this with the most fundamental issue of food and body, we will be forever stuck in an obsession that keeps us from our true selves. — Carol Emery Normandi

Like baseball, food will never go out of style; we will always need to eat and we will always find it entertaining. I think of food TV this way - all the fun and none of the calories. — Gail Simmons

A gourmet who thinks of calories is like a tart who looks at her watch. — James Beard

Precisely when hominins learned to manipulate fire is unclear. But recent research suggests that fire, in the form of cooking, helps account for the leap into the genus Homo, who became physiologically dependent on cooked food. By boosting calories, and by detoxifying and softening food, controlled fire allowed us to exchange big guts for big brains. Experiments confirm that we cannot thrive or reproduce on raw foods alone: they simply cannot deliver the calories and they require more chewing, digestive juices, and intestinal machinery. With cooking that digestive process begins earlier. If the observations hold, they say that humans and fire have not simply co-existed but co-evolved. We are not only the keystone species for fire: fire is a keystone process for our existence. — Anonymous

I'm social enough. But the tools you guys create actually manufacture unnaturally extreme social needs. No one needs the level of contact you're purveying. It improves nothing. It's not nourishing. It's like snack food. You know how they engineer this food? They scientifically determine precisely how much salt and fat they need to include to keep you eating. You're not hungry, you don't need the food, it does nothing for you, but you keep eating these empty calories. This is what you're pushing. Same thing. Endless empty calories, but the digital-social equivalent. — Dave Eggers

Fooling the body into thinking it's full on only a thousand calories can be difficult. The trick is to chew the food until it's pretty much liquid. This way, vomiting after burns less — J. Matthew Nespoli

I like to put good food in my mouth, and while I am aware of the calories I ingest, instead of cutting them I make them count. I have a full-on love affair with food, appreciating the different cultures and processes within it. — Brittany Gibbons

I have been in Paris for almost a week and I have not heard anyone say calories, or cholesterol, or even arterial plaque. The French do not season their food with regret. — Mary-Lou Weisman