The time of day you have a meal, how fast you scoff your food and even how much you chew it can affect how many calories you get from it.
The key to maintaining a healthy weight, accepted wisdom suggests, is to count the calories we eat against the calories we expend. It makes sense – energy in versus energy out. Sounds simple, doesn’t it?
But this way of thinking misses an important truth: not all of our food’s calories are the same. There’s actually a complex biological interaction taking place inside our bodies, influenced by the type of food we eat, how quickly we consume it and its interaction with the bustling community of microbes living inside our guts.
“This is a huge expanding area of research,” says Sarah Berry, professor of nutrition at King’s College London in the UK. “We’re really starting to see just how variable our responses are to food – and that I could eat something that I would metabolise in a very different way to how you might metabolise the same food.”
When we eat
What we eat clearly still matters – a diet filled with fresh vegetables is going to be better for you than one dominated by cheeseburgers. But it’s far from the only consideration. The timing of food, for example, also plays a role in how well we digest it and what nutrients our bodies extract.