A good proxy for this general capacity in a human body from organic digestible material is kcal.
What I’m getting at is that measuring the ‘energy’ of food is meaningless. It’s a waste of time at best,
and when someone is mislead into thinking that they can eat 100 kcal of sugar (if we can even accurately determine that!) instead of nutrients then it can even be harmful.
You can quantify this work
In the human body? How do you propose to do this?
food isn’t really what we eat either
I’m pretty sure we generally eat food. We surely don’t eat energy.
If you have an alternative to this
Let’s start by not talking about energy at all. It’s biology and chemistry.
The oxidation of sugar, which is accomplished in our bodies, can be directly measured. The end products are CO2 and H2O. If you fully combust sugar in a bomb calorimeter, the energy release is equivalent. So whether your body breaks apart something, or fire breaks apart something, they are calorimetrically equivalent, which is why people even bothered with kcals for food in the first place.
Whether you see value in it or not, kcals observe a physical reality which has value within human cells and can be used to describe how human bodies interact with food in an energetic landscape. It does not purport to solve all of human nutrition, and nobody sane uses it for that. It is used as a gross representation of energetic equivalence, for which it serves its purpose reasonably well.
So again, if you believe your interpretation of human nutrition and biology and chemistry is novel or more useful, then submit to a journal your recommendations. Journals even accept review papers which are simply syntheses of existing papers, you don’t even have to conduct experiments. You can literally just go on pubmed and synthesize a paper and submit it for publication.
Don’t submit to a predatory journal though that uses a pay to publish format. Submit to an established, peer reviewed journal.
Conversely, just publish it on bioarxiv or something and then post it here for people to go to and review, though this is not as good as getting it peer reviewed.
If you do publish something, do post another comment here and I’ll review it.
What I’m getting at is that measuring the ‘energy’ of food is meaningless. It’s a waste of time at best, and when someone is mislead into thinking that they can eat 100 kcal of sugar (if we can even accurately determine that!) instead of nutrients then it can even be harmful.
In the human body? How do you propose to do this?
I’m pretty sure we generally eat food. We surely don’t eat energy.
Let’s start by not talking about energy at all. It’s biology and chemistry.
The oxidation of sugar, which is accomplished in our bodies, can be directly measured. The end products are CO2 and H2O. If you fully combust sugar in a bomb calorimeter, the energy release is equivalent. So whether your body breaks apart something, or fire breaks apart something, they are calorimetrically equivalent, which is why people even bothered with kcals for food in the first place.
Whether you see value in it or not, kcals observe a physical reality which has value within human cells and can be used to describe how human bodies interact with food in an energetic landscape. It does not purport to solve all of human nutrition, and nobody sane uses it for that. It is used as a gross representation of energetic equivalence, for which it serves its purpose reasonably well.
So again, if you believe your interpretation of human nutrition and biology and chemistry is novel or more useful, then submit to a journal your recommendations. Journals even accept review papers which are simply syntheses of existing papers, you don’t even have to conduct experiments. You can literally just go on pubmed and synthesize a paper and submit it for publication.
Don’t submit to a predatory journal though that uses a pay to publish format. Submit to an established, peer reviewed journal.
Conversely, just publish it on bioarxiv or something and then post it here for people to go to and review, though this is not as good as getting it peer reviewed.
If you do publish something, do post another comment here and I’ll review it.