Today I want to cover another fundamental aspect of nutrition that is somewhat easy to confuse. That concept is referred to as energy density. Energy density integrates, in a fashion, the concepts of calories, nutrients and food intake.
First I want to define energy density before looking at some examples that will hopefully make the concept a bit more clear. Finally, I’ll look at applications of the energy density concept in terms of dieting, weight gain, etc.
What is Energy Density?
Conceptually, energy density refers to how many calories are found in a given weight or volume or food. Ok, what does that mean. Let’s say that you have 1 gram of each of the three macronutrients which are protein, carbohydrates and fat.
We know that these are given calorie values of 4 cal/g for protein and carbohydrate and 9 cal/g for fat. Clearly, in this simple example, fat has over twice the energy density of either carbs or fat (9 cal in one gram vs.… Keep Reading