I bought my cats some pouches filled with tuna broth and a bit of tuna and I’m trying to figure out how much energy one of those gives them. There is 13 kcal in a pouch. The internet says there are a thousand calories in a kcal. But that would mean there is 13000 calories just in a little soup. Thats enough to sustain a person for a week. This makes zero sense. What am I not understanding?
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Food generally uses “Calories” with an uppercase C, where 1Calorie is equivalent to 1kcal, or 1000 calories with a lowercase c.
calories with a lowercase c are too small of a unit for most people to think about in day to day life, and kcalorie is a little confusing, so we use Calorie like we do Mb vs MB for megabit vs megabytes.
(This is region dependent!)
1 Cal (food calorie) =
1 kcal (kilocalorie) =
1000 cal (heat calorie)
The 2000 daily Calorie requirement we think of is actually measured in kcals. It’s little-c calorie vs big-C Calorie.
A Calorie is actually the same thing as a kcal. It’s confusing as fuck, I know.
A calorie (lower case c) is the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1 degree Celsius. The Calorie (capital C) that you see on food labels is equal to 1000 calories, which is the same thing as a kcal.
In conversational use, kcal and calories in general are sometimes swapped or grouped together. We say one when we mean the other.
Your cat is not eating a week’s worth of food from the dinky little pouch
What you are missing is that food Calories on your cereal or yogurt or whatever are actual kcal. A 1 Calorie tic tac is actually 1,000 calories.
It is 13 000 calories.
1 calorie is just so small amount of “energy”
The word “calorie” can be used in a scientific sense, where it means the amount of energy needed to raise one gram/cc of water one degree C. Kilocalories are, as you’ve noted, a thousand of these units.
In common usage, though, “Calorie” – often written with the capital C – is identical to the scientific kilocalorie.
When someone is talking about a “2,000/day caloric intake,” they’re technically referring to 2,000 kilocalories.
A calorie is the amount of energy it takes to increase one gram of water by one degree.
A Calorie is a thousand calories. A kilocalorie is also a thousand calories.
The daily recommendation is around 2000kcal, not 2000 calories.
You missunderstood the daily needed calorie intake for a normal person. you need around 2,000kcal or 2,000,000 for an adult male.
In casual conversation, we use both terms but actually always refer to to kcal. Almost every label is using kcal to report nutritional values and daily intake is 2000 for women and 2500 kcal for men
kcals are what you think of when you think of Calories (upper case C). A calorie is one one thousandth of a Calorie this is very very little energy, e.g. chewing a stick of sugar free gum you’ll ingest about 10 calories.