Calories and calories

Deserts do not have Calories, but desserts do. Of course, getting your just deserts means getting what you deserve. So getting your deserts and getting your desserts might be the same thing. No wonder there is such confusion about the words.

Calories share the same type of confusion. A calorie is a unit of measure required to increase the temperature of one kilogram of water one degree Celsius. A food Calorie is actually 1,000 calories compared to calories in chemistry. Usually calories are spelled with a small "c" and food Calories spelled with capital "C".

Food Calories are counted,  according to the National Data Lab, based on an indirect calorie estimation made using the Atwater system. The total caloric value is calculated by adding up the calories provided by the energy-containing nutrients: protein, carbohydrate, fat and alcohol. Because carbohydrates contain some fiber that is not digested and utilized by the body, the fiber component is usually subtracted from the total carbohydrate before calculating calories. The label on a food item that contains 10 g of protein, 20 g of carbohydrate and 9 g of fat would read 201 kcals or Calories.