Counting Calories

I've starting using the electronic kitchen scales to estimate the energy content of food.

An interesting conclusion is that just one slice of brown bread, with butter and marmalade, is about 240 kilo calories, about an eighth of my daily requirement and enough energy to lift something weighing a ton to a height of a hundred metres ¹.

35 grams of bread accounted for 90 k cals, 11 grams of margarine for 77 k cals, and 30 g of marmalade for about 75 k cals. I spread margarine quite thinly; many people would use twice as much. Some people use low calorie margarine substitutes. Those contain extra water, for which the manufacturers charge extra, and I suspect that people who use them spread them so thickly that their energy intake (at about 5 k cals per gram) is even greater than it would be if they used ordinary margarine or butter.

Incidentally, note how many people say just 'calorie' instead of 'kilo calorie', thus wishfully dividing their intake by 1000.

¹ Originally I had that as just one metre, but realised my error while checking the calculation in bed the night after posting. I have always been a little accident prone, alas.