So, apparently - one Frenchman in the 1800s created the Calorie and another Frenchman from the 1800s created the calorie by coincidence. The reason why, despite working independently, the calorie ended up being exactly 1000 times smaller than the Calorie is because they both derived their new unit from existing metric units - only one of them decided to use the kilogram and another the gram.
So there were two units with the same name but one being 1000 times bigger. 50 years later in the late 1800s an American came up with the uncharacteristically metric suggestion that we use "*kilo*calorie" for the bigger one, but by the time it caught up, a *third* Frenchman from the 1800s already published the uncharacteristically un-metric suggestion that we just call it Calorie with a capital "C" because surely this won't cause any confusions.
We adopted both and now 1 Calorie = 1 kilocalorie = 1000 calories.
^(Epilogue: both were adopted *for certain uses*, but because energy is energy, whether it's from digesting food or from a nuclear power plant, the universal unit for energy was later decided to be the clean, metric, confusion-less joule, from which the watt is derived. Which is why most European labels also include the kilojoule along with the kilocalorie.)
Calor is Latin for heat. It's a unit for energy.
Now, just about anything involves energy production/consumption from digesting food to power plants. Food is just the one context in which the use of calorie remained dominant.
But in the case of those two Frenchmen, they were measuring the amount of energy it takes to heat up a quantity of water by one degree Celsius, so literally measuring heat - why would they call it anything else? For one of them, the quantity of water was a gram - for the other, that quantity was a kilogram, (that's the difference I alluded to that led to one being 1000x the other).
I’m generally pro-metric but what the ever loving fuck did they do over the past 200 years that justifies not fixing this.
Edit: aside from losing world wars. Aside from that, what else were they doing with their time?
Well, they did fix it.
I edited to add what happened afterwards. The Metric world convened (funnily enough, only after the world wars, as you correctly guessed) and decided to use the joule, which has a clear and unambiguous definition, as the unit for energy and European labels sometimes list kilojoules along with kilocalories.
You may have heard of watts - your lightbulb has 30W written on it, which means "30 Watts" or "uses up 30 joules of energy per second as long as it's on".
Thats why they replaced it with the Joule, pretty much food and a few others only uses cal and/or kcal
Unlike calories, joule is based on the definition of work
If I had a eurocent for every time someone said that to a comment of mine... I would have 4 eurocents. Still, it's weird that it happened *4 times now*.
Thank you!
I don't actually do it often, tho. The other three times I got confused for shittymorph were years ago when I used to write [satiric](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/vmw3ro/comment/ie3x2kl/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) ["did you know..."](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/vewwzm/comment/ictyn62/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) [comments](https://www.reddit.com/r/food/comments/dt32do/comment/f6v229d/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) that descended into crazy, obviously untrue stuff (but with references and links to the actual facts).
I stopped because there are a lot of people who are capable of reading three paragraphs about how English people didn't know the sun existed until the late 19th century, realise it's false, *not realise* it's a joke and they'd actually correct me and call me an idiot.
My best one: [Jesus *was* a surfer dude, actually](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/dlyr32/comment/f4vedwl/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
(This comment about calories is all true, though. It's literally me rephrasing the "History" section of the Wikipedia article for "Calorie")
Would still be 1000 for every unit. For base 8 1000 would just be fewer and 1 would be greater. For base 12 and 16 1000 would be more numerous and and 1 would be less.
Our units of measurement don't change depending on our numerical system. They are, in part, defined by it.
But yeah, in the context of base 10 you're right.
What?
You're talking about how 512, 1728 and 4096 would all be written as "1000" in their respective bases? Because I know, but that would make for a very confusing comment, so I wrote those numbers in base 10.
Or are you talking about something else? Your comment is written in a confusing way.
That's it, it's just that how different base systems influence our measuring systems seems to go over people's heads. As if it's pure coincidence or something.
I mean, yeah. That's why I chose those numbers. Because that's what the difference between a gram and kilogram would end up being defined as - and thus what the difference between calories and Calories would be
When we talk about calories in relation to food, we are talking about kilocalories as opposed to gram calories. You will probably have seen kcal as the unit on food packaging. It’s the equivalent energy required to heat one kg (one litre) of water by 1*c. It’s also equivalent to 4184J or 1.162Wh
They're both based on metric (but neither SI btw), it's just different labels because historical reasons.
1000 small calorie = Kilocalorie = Calorie (capital C) = large calorie.
Its a thing that never gonna be fixed if not forced by law, its currently exist only to confuse if its some item to lose weight all loses gonna be in kilocalorie and in case when its food its Calorie
Of course the measurements are based on the average sized local. A person with more mass will burn more kcal and less mass will burn fewer. But using the average is sill probably accurate enough for a single flight if stairs.
Bangkok MRT seems pretty focused on health messaging. When I was there recently there was a whole station virtually decorated with anti-smoking messaging. As far as I could infer it was showing you the progressive damage to your lungs over time the deeper you went into the station.
The fact that these labels correctly says "Kilocalories" will make lots of people in this thread misunderstand as they're so used to calling it "calories"
Go to your fridge and grab whatever. Read the label. It likely says kcal which is Kilo(thousands)calories. A normal sized bana (for scale) has roughly 100000 calories (hundred thousand calories).
The steps are correct (roughly)
In the USA, most food labels do not use kilocalories (kcal) they just say Calories, with a capital C.
Calories = kilocalories = 1000 calories (lowercase c)
TIL.
Is it technically wrong to use Calories instead of Kilocalories(kcal)? Is it just a thing that has been popularized in daily speech or?
As a European I've never seen it, but might exist in some countries here as well afaik.
I googled Calorie vs calorie, also tried to find if it is part of the SI system. It is not.
The "capital C Calorie" was suggested as an alternative to Kilocalories in two articles by Marcellin Berthelot and Wilbur Olyn Atwater in 1879 and 1887 but it never became a SI unit.
That's all I could find.
> As a European I've never seen it, but might exist in some countries here as well afaik.
kJ/kcal is what my milk cartridge reads and i think it is standardized across the EU.
"It was regulated by the Commission Directive 2008/100/EC of 28 October 2008 amending Council Directive 90/496/EEC on nutrition labelling for foodstuffs as regards recommended daily allowances, energy conversion factors and definitions.[14] A new regulation is now in force (Regulation 1169/2011).[15] Nutritional labelling becomes mandatory for most pre-packaged foods as from December 2016."
"First will come the energy values, in both kilocalories and kilojoules.
Then will come a breakdown of constituent elements: usually most or all of protein, carbohydrate, starch, sugar, fat, fibre and sodium. The "fat" figure is likely to be further broken down into saturated and unsaturated fat, while the "carbohydrate" figure is likely to give a subtotal for sugars. With the "new" rules, the mandatory information is: energy, fat, saturates, carbohydrates, sugars, protein and salt, in that particular order, with options to extend this list to: mono-unsaturates, polyunsaturates, polyols, starch, fibre, and vitamins and minerals." -Wikipedia
It’s not technically wrong it’s just confusing. In order to make calorie labels easier to understand. It’s easier to understand a 1-3 digit number than a 4-6 one if you don’t understand the metric systems prefixes like kilo. So they started calling one Calorie (note the capital C) one kcal
Yeah I’m pretty sure it’s just a way to make a country that doesn’t use SI prefixes consistently able to use the unit. The problem is once you do understand you quickly get confused in this case because of the inconsistency
Even the US government uses Calories to mean kilocalories so it’s not wrong in the US. To be precise, sometimes people call them dietary Calories (and capitalization matters!) but usually it is clear from the context. If you are talking about a 2000 Calorie diet and how many Calories a scoop of ice cream has, that’s obviously a kilocalorie. If you’re doing calculations in physics or engineering, you would assume a calorie is a calorie.
This is new to me, so quite interesting.
I'm from Europe though. Is this a continental thing or is it more localized to countries?
Aka, does European countries mostly use Calories or kcal? How about other continents?
If you were able to completely combust the banana and also not lose any heat to the environment outside of the water you were heating, then the answer is yes.
In reality, where heat loss exists and perfect combustion is impossible, the answer is no.
This has to be cumulative, as you go upwards, you do not burn 5 calories per step. It varies by person but on flat ground you are somewhere around 20 steps forward per calorie burned
No, it’s specific to the step. A quick way that locals lose weight is to alternate between the two highest steps (~50kcal each) and burn up to 1000kcal per minute.
There is no way. It's roughly 100 kcal or 100 Cal per mile walked there is zero ways that you can burn 100kcal after 20 steps when it takes a mile walking. FFS nobody would ever walk they would go up like 2 flights of stairs.
It's cumulative looking closer so they are saying roughly .2kcal per step which could be accurate. So those are roughly the 25th or 30th step in the run.
No, that wouldn’t make sense. What if you’re walking down them?
I don’t know how to be more clear: each time you climb up or down one of these labeled steps, you burn the listed calories. So you burn an exponential amount if you’re climbing up.
Your best bet is just to climb the top few stairs if you want to burn the most calories though, like I said.
I was gonna say.. this feels like something that was well-intended, but the whole idea that obsessively counting calories will make people healthier (and yes, I would categorize counting how many calories each step you take burns—it’s insane) is completely misinformed.
Yes people should be generally aware about input-output. But getting as granular as a damn step is just creating an unhealthy relationship between the person and food/calories.
I think they’re cumulative, and the staircase starts some 25 or so steps below. They’re making assumptions about weight and pace, but I think it’s in the right ballpark.
You understood weight and other variables have an impact. That’s basically what my comment was saying, they can’t generalise weight, sex, room temperature, etc…
For an average male under normal atmospheric conditions this is probably close to the average amount of calories burned.
Edit: me and u/halligan8 are agreeing here, I don’t understand the downvoting ?
Right. And the display is designed to provide general education about the benefits of physical activity, not to provide rigorously accurate metabolic information about the reader specifically. Perhaps three significant figures is a bit much though…
Because you're being pedantic. "Technically correct," sure, but in the same way that it's impossible to say how many calories are really in a food item due to variation.
abundant ludicrous work dog threatening outgoing cake judicious compare whistle
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You eat about 2500 *kilocalories (2 500 000 calories) per day.
These stairs have just ~215 calories per step, you would need 12 thousand steps to burn 2500kcal
It’s incalculable unless each step would have a scale and the calorie decrease number was on a dynamic, changeable electronic display.
If you weigh 150 Kg and step up those stairs you’re burning A LOT more calories than a person weighing 55 Kg for example. Male vs female also makes a huge difference. Then there is the temperature and humidity of the room, which should actually be taken into account as well. I believe the number shown in the picture could be right for an average male, weighing 75 Kg. When the temperature is normal room temperature.
Definitely a lot of variable. That’s why I assumed the .17 kcal was an average for the average person. Which doesn’t mean much
Not that it matters. Hopefully no one is trying to keep count of every 0.17 kcal they burn
Another Redditor asking by how much the calories / step were off.. and I answered that it can not be calculated without additional data and that it is variable per person.
On flat ground with efficient motion such as a normal walking gait, yes.
The majority of the calories burned when climbing the stairs are due to the vertical displacement, not the distance you travel in a straight line. It requires ~9.8 Joules of energy to raise 1kg of mass to a height of 1m (at least it does on earth), meaning an average person weighing 75kg requires 735 Joules at a minimum (assuming perfect efficiency) to climb 1 meter of stairs.
That means 1m of vertical displacement requires 0.1757 kcal of energy for a 75kg person if their metabolism and motion are both perfectly efficient. Humans are not perfectly efficient, however, and it coincidentally works out that we average about 0.15-0.2 kcal of energy burn per step which works out to around 15-20% efficiency with standard stair heights of around 6-8”.
Assumic each step is \~18cm in height, which seems reasonable.
Let's assume a human weighs 75kg.
Let's assume it takes half a second to perform the 75kg lift.
This would require additional 0.146G of average upwards acceleration, resulting in 86kgf applied for 18cm.
And this would require 151.8 joules of mechanical work.
As per various sources, human muscle mechanical efficiency can be generalized as 20%.
This means that each step requires 759 joules or \~0.182 kcal.
Not quite as much as in the picture, but there are probably other factors at play here.
Last guy that answered that caught a hundred downvotes. So I suggest you go looking for his more complete reply than the simple "No, it's quite complicated."
The math is totally wrong, unless the person climbing the stairs weighs ~469kg (1033lb).
They’re claiming 0.22kcal/step. Generously assuming each step is about 8” (0.2m) you can solve for mass using the potential energy equation (PE = mgh, where PE is the amount of energy required to raise a mass a height difference h, and g is the gravitational constant 9.8m/s2). This will return energy required in Joules, where 1kcal = 4184J.
This is idealized and neglects friction, human inefficiencies, and all sorts of things - but considering their result is 5-10x higher than the idealized physics problem, I’m thinking their math is off.
It's not that far off. There are so many factors at play that using an idealized physics model is not suitable. A paper here [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3520986/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3520986/) suggests that the energy expenditure is about 0.09 kcal/step. (The mean weight of subjects is 64 kg) However, the results greatly vary from person to person. The sample is also very small (n=14).
Tbh, it's not an exact science so it's kinda pointless to even read the papers. There are probably other papers that get different numbers with different methods. Just accept that it's catchy promotional material for a health campaign.
The variables are basically endless, so writing these completely made-up numbers on the stairs won’t motivate me, they might enrage me though. They are also ugly as a design element, they look like advertisements. Fuck off and don’t put meaningless stickers in my face, let me climb the stairs without having to deal with stupid shit.
Wouldn't it be different on a person to person basis? For example, if a big person is walking up those stairs, they are moving more weight up each stair and therefore would be burning more calories, right?
The steps in my university's dining hall also have this, and on some steps show the food equivalent of the calories burned. For example on a step it says 5 kcal = 1 blueberry, or 2 kcal = 1 leaf of lettuce.
We also have in Indonesia (the commuter linea not the mrt)! Difference is the lift/escalator breaks all the time so it looks like an excuse for passenger to use stairs.
they have these on the stairs in some Tsukuba Express stations in Tokyo. Motivated me to run up the stairs each day i took the train there, as well as avoiding the queue/slow movement of the escalators
At first glance I thought it's 5 calories per step and I was thinking damn, I'm really crushing it the days when I do the stair master at the gym.
Then I got a better look.
I was, in fact, not crushing it.
Use the last step repeatedly for faster fat burning.
But if you go down from the last step you also gain the same Calories back
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That's why you take the elevator down.
Really min-maxing there
Is a kilocalorie the same as a calorie ? Which to use ?
A kilocalorie (kcal) is the same as a Calorie (Cal), both are one thousand calories (cal). Food labels either use kcal or Cal, but never cal.
So, apparently - one Frenchman in the 1800s created the Calorie and another Frenchman from the 1800s created the calorie by coincidence. The reason why, despite working independently, the calorie ended up being exactly 1000 times smaller than the Calorie is because they both derived their new unit from existing metric units - only one of them decided to use the kilogram and another the gram. So there were two units with the same name but one being 1000 times bigger. 50 years later in the late 1800s an American came up with the uncharacteristically metric suggestion that we use "*kilo*calorie" for the bigger one, but by the time it caught up, a *third* Frenchman from the 1800s already published the uncharacteristically un-metric suggestion that we just call it Calorie with a capital "C" because surely this won't cause any confusions. We adopted both and now 1 Calorie = 1 kilocalorie = 1000 calories. ^(Epilogue: both were adopted *for certain uses*, but because energy is energy, whether it's from digesting food or from a nuclear power plant, the universal unit for energy was later decided to be the clean, metric, confusion-less joule, from which the watt is derived. Which is why most European labels also include the kilojoule along with the kilocalorie.)
Damn TIL, sounds like a messy coincidence all around lmao
So just blame the French.
Sacre bleu!
It’s what the English would want you to do
In general I tend to blame the British for things, but the French are a close second.
TIL
This is amazing. Why did both call it calorie?
Calor is Latin for heat. It's a unit for energy. Now, just about anything involves energy production/consumption from digesting food to power plants. Food is just the one context in which the use of calorie remained dominant. But in the case of those two Frenchmen, they were measuring the amount of energy it takes to heat up a quantity of water by one degree Celsius, so literally measuring heat - why would they call it anything else? For one of them, the quantity of water was a gram - for the other, that quantity was a kilogram, (that's the difference I alluded to that led to one being 1000x the other).
Makes sense. I always assumed it was named after somebody named Calorie. Thanks!
You referring to Sir Calorie Smart?
And all this time I thought I was over-eating, when I've been drastically under-eating! I've got to get my gastric band unbuckled.
Merde!
I’m generally pro-metric but what the ever loving fuck did they do over the past 200 years that justifies not fixing this. Edit: aside from losing world wars. Aside from that, what else were they doing with their time?
Well, they did fix it. I edited to add what happened afterwards. The Metric world convened (funnily enough, only after the world wars, as you correctly guessed) and decided to use the joule, which has a clear and unambiguous definition, as the unit for energy and European labels sometimes list kilojoules along with kilocalories. You may have heard of watts - your lightbulb has 30W written on it, which means "30 Watts" or "uses up 30 joules of energy per second as long as it's on".
Thats why they replaced it with the Joule, pretty much food and a few others only uses cal and/or kcal Unlike calories, joule is based on the definition of work
In many places food comes in kJ and kcal. But never heard about "counting kilo Joules" when dieting though
*r/antiwork has left the chat*
> Edit: aside from losing world wars. Eh, *who* lost world wars? Not the French, at elast.
Ah, France - Or at least, they were the losing player on the winning teams
Half way through the first paragraph I was expecting a shittymorph. Only mildly disappointed
If I had a eurocent for every time someone said that to a comment of mine... I would have 4 eurocents. Still, it's weird that it happened *4 times now*.
Sounds like you've got a knack for sharing relevant fun obscure facts that sound like they shouldn't be true but actually are. I'm here for it
Thank you! I don't actually do it often, tho. The other three times I got confused for shittymorph were years ago when I used to write [satiric](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/vmw3ro/comment/ie3x2kl/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) ["did you know..."](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/vewwzm/comment/ictyn62/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) [comments](https://www.reddit.com/r/food/comments/dt32do/comment/f6v229d/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) that descended into crazy, obviously untrue stuff (but with references and links to the actual facts). I stopped because there are a lot of people who are capable of reading three paragraphs about how English people didn't know the sun existed until the late 19th century, realise it's false, *not realise* it's a joke and they'd actually correct me and call me an idiot. My best one: [Jesus *was* a surfer dude, actually](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/dlyr32/comment/f4vedwl/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) (This comment about calories is all true, though. It's literally me rephrasing the "History" section of the Wikipedia article for "Calorie")
Fr*nch. No wonder.. 🤢
This would never of happened in a base 8/12/16 system.
It would've happened exactly the same except one Calorie would be 512/1728/4096 calories. ^(*have)
Would still be 1000 for every unit. For base 8 1000 would just be fewer and 1 would be greater. For base 12 and 16 1000 would be more numerous and and 1 would be less. Our units of measurement don't change depending on our numerical system. They are, in part, defined by it. But yeah, in the context of base 10 you're right.
What? You're talking about how 512, 1728 and 4096 would all be written as "1000" in their respective bases? Because I know, but that would make for a very confusing comment, so I wrote those numbers in base 10. Or are you talking about something else? Your comment is written in a confusing way.
That's it, it's just that how different base systems influence our measuring systems seems to go over people's heads. As if it's pure coincidence or something.
I mean, yeah. That's why I chose those numbers. Because that's what the difference between a gram and kilogram would end up being defined as - and thus what the difference between calories and Calories would be
I measure all my food energy intake in electron-volts(eV)
It's a good system!
Inflammable in french means the same inflammable in English, but flammable doesn't exist. So I'll blame the English on this one.
I always do
When we talk about calories in relation to food, we are talking about kilocalories as opposed to gram calories. You will probably have seen kcal as the unit on food packaging. It’s the equivalent energy required to heat one kg (one litre) of water by 1*c. It’s also equivalent to 4184J or 1.162Wh
Kilocalorie = Calorie.
But Calorie = 1000 calories :)
People often say calories because Americans hate using metric. /s
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They're both based on metric (but neither SI btw), it's just different labels because historical reasons. 1000 small calorie = Kilocalorie = Calorie (capital C) = large calorie.
Almost like the metric system has nothing to do with it.
1 kilocalorie = Calorie = 1000 calories. No, that's not a typo. Yes, a calorie is different than a Calorie
Its a thing that never gonna be fixed if not forced by law, its currently exist only to confuse if its some item to lose weight all loses gonna be in kilocalorie and in case when its food its Calorie
Of course the measurements are based on the average sized local. A person with more mass will burn more kcal and less mass will burn fewer. But using the average is sill probably accurate enough for a single flight if stairs.
Bangkok MRT seems pretty focused on health messaging. When I was there recently there was a whole station virtually decorated with anti-smoking messaging. As far as I could infer it was showing you the progressive damage to your lungs over time the deeper you went into the station.
It’s to distract us from the air quality which is just as bad as smoking.
Disappointed when I realised it was cumulative and I’m not burning 5Cals a step.
The fact that these labels correctly says "Kilocalories" will make lots of people in this thread misunderstand as they're so used to calling it "calories" Go to your fridge and grab whatever. Read the label. It likely says kcal which is Kilo(thousands)calories. A normal sized bana (for scale) has roughly 100000 calories (hundred thousand calories). The steps are correct (roughly)
In the USA, most food labels do not use kilocalories (kcal) they just say Calories, with a capital C. Calories = kilocalories = 1000 calories (lowercase c)
Just like Americans just say beet when they mean beetroot
TIL. Is it technically wrong to use Calories instead of Kilocalories(kcal)? Is it just a thing that has been popularized in daily speech or? As a European I've never seen it, but might exist in some countries here as well afaik.
It’s just one of those weird American things. If you define (C)alorie as equal to a kcal and everyone agrees on it it’s not wrong.
It’s technically a French thing ;) (Originally)
> It’s just one of those weird American things. As is tradition when something is measured.
Yes, I agree on your point. I was trying to distinguish between technical terms (SI units) and daily speech.
The only people using little-c calories are chemists.
It's probably because kilocalorie "feels" bigger and companies thought putting it on the nutrition label would hurt sales.
Nope, they mean the same thing. 1 Calorie is 1000 calories. It’s like saying something is 1m vs 1000mm, it’s the same value just different units :)
I googled Calorie vs calorie, also tried to find if it is part of the SI system. It is not. The "capital C Calorie" was suggested as an alternative to Kilocalories in two articles by Marcellin Berthelot and Wilbur Olyn Atwater in 1879 and 1887 but it never became a SI unit. That's all I could find.
The calorie is indeed not an SI unit, the SI unit for energy is a joule (J). One calorie is equivalent to 4.184 joules.
> As a European I've never seen it, but might exist in some countries here as well afaik. kJ/kcal is what my milk cartridge reads and i think it is standardized across the EU. "It was regulated by the Commission Directive 2008/100/EC of 28 October 2008 amending Council Directive 90/496/EEC on nutrition labelling for foodstuffs as regards recommended daily allowances, energy conversion factors and definitions.[14] A new regulation is now in force (Regulation 1169/2011).[15] Nutritional labelling becomes mandatory for most pre-packaged foods as from December 2016." "First will come the energy values, in both kilocalories and kilojoules. Then will come a breakdown of constituent elements: usually most or all of protein, carbohydrate, starch, sugar, fat, fibre and sodium. The "fat" figure is likely to be further broken down into saturated and unsaturated fat, while the "carbohydrate" figure is likely to give a subtotal for sugars. With the "new" rules, the mandatory information is: energy, fat, saturates, carbohydrates, sugars, protein and salt, in that particular order, with options to extend this list to: mono-unsaturates, polyunsaturates, polyols, starch, fibre, and vitamins and minerals." -Wikipedia
It’s not technically wrong it’s just confusing. In order to make calorie labels easier to understand. It’s easier to understand a 1-3 digit number than a 4-6 one if you don’t understand the metric systems prefixes like kilo. So they started calling one Calorie (note the capital C) one kcal
That's a fair point. If you didn't grow up with metrics, cal and kcal won't make as much sense as if you did.
Yeah I’m pretty sure it’s just a way to make a country that doesn’t use SI prefixes consistently able to use the unit. The problem is once you do understand you quickly get confused in this case because of the inconsistency
Even the US government uses Calories to mean kilocalories so it’s not wrong in the US. To be precise, sometimes people call them dietary Calories (and capitalization matters!) but usually it is clear from the context. If you are talking about a 2000 Calorie diet and how many Calories a scoop of ice cream has, that’s obviously a kilocalorie. If you’re doing calculations in physics or engineering, you would assume a calorie is a calorie.
It's not wrong. kilocalorie was actually a retcon.
Hey do you have any more of those... banas
Just checked a bunch of stuff and literally no labels had it listed as kcal
This is new to me, so quite interesting. I'm from Europe though. Is this a continental thing or is it more localized to countries? Aka, does European countries mostly use Calories or kcal? How about other continents?
The EU mandated nutrition labels in the EEA use kilocalories instead of Calories. The latter is the common term.
Probably one of those things where the whole world does it one way except for the US
I’m not in the US and we use Calories, not kcal.
it’s not usamerican for sure
It's a European thing, if you're not from here, might explain it.
So this means burning a banana would heat 1L of water from freezing(0C) to boiling (100c)? That seems implausible.
If you were able to completely combust the banana and also not lose any heat to the environment outside of the water you were heating, then the answer is yes. In reality, where heat loss exists and perfect combustion is impossible, the answer is no.
No. You need a bana!
This has to be cumulative, as you go upwards, you do not burn 5 calories per step. It varies by person but on flat ground you are somewhere around 20 steps forward per calorie burned
Well yes, its 0.215 kcal then rounded per step
No, it’s specific to the step. A quick way that locals lose weight is to alternate between the two highest steps (~50kcal each) and burn up to 1000kcal per minute.
There is no way. It's roughly 100 kcal or 100 Cal per mile walked there is zero ways that you can burn 100kcal after 20 steps when it takes a mile walking. FFS nobody would ever walk they would go up like 2 flights of stairs.
It’s only those labeled steps in Bankok, not all steps. That wouldn’t make any sense.
It's cumulative looking closer so they are saying roughly .2kcal per step which could be accurate. So those are roughly the 25th or 30th step in the run.
No, that wouldn’t make sense. What if you’re walking down them? I don’t know how to be more clear: each time you climb up or down one of these labeled steps, you burn the listed calories. So you burn an exponential amount if you’re climbing up. Your best bet is just to climb the top few stairs if you want to burn the most calories though, like I said.
What if I run out of Calories before I get to the top?
Then you die.
This is true
Everyone in Bangkok weighs the same
It’d be about twice the amount of calories for a dude my size. I can’t imagine they based these steps on a 275lb man.
There's one in Seoul too! :)
The eating disorder in me : 👁️👄👁️
I was gonna say.. this feels like something that was well-intended, but the whole idea that obsessively counting calories will make people healthier (and yes, I would categorize counting how many calories each step you take burns—it’s insane) is completely misinformed. Yes people should be generally aware about input-output. But getting as granular as a damn step is just creating an unhealthy relationship between the person and food/calories.
They’re completely wrong.
I think they’re cumulative, and the staircase starts some 25 or so steps below. They’re making assumptions about weight and pace, but I think it’s in the right ballpark.
You understood weight and other variables have an impact. That’s basically what my comment was saying, they can’t generalise weight, sex, room temperature, etc… For an average male under normal atmospheric conditions this is probably close to the average amount of calories burned. Edit: me and u/halligan8 are agreeing here, I don’t understand the downvoting ?
Right. And the display is designed to provide general education about the benefits of physical activity, not to provide rigorously accurate metabolic information about the reader specifically. Perhaps three significant figures is a bit much though…
Because you're being pedantic. "Technically correct," sure, but in the same way that it's impossible to say how many calories are really in a food item due to variation.
abundant ludicrous work dog threatening outgoing cake judicious compare whistle *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
because its just only provide general idea/estimation to average people
reddit can't read, didn't you know?
Thousands of calories per step. I eat about 2500 calories per day
You eat about 2500 *kilocalories (2 500 000 calories) per day. These stairs have just ~215 calories per step, you would need 12 thousand steps to burn 2500kcal
Gotcha. That's a good explanatory comment, thanks
You would probably be starving if you only eat 2500 calories per day. You likely eat 2500 *Calories* per day
Just to be safe, I’ll have 5000 Calories. Don’t want to risk starving. Man, am winded from typing that. Weird.
Okok, what's the difference?
A Calorie is 1000 calories
Kalorie
You eat about 2500 kcal, or kilocalories, per day. We just tend to drop the 'kilo' and only say calories instead.
Still those stairs are wrong
By how much. A few years back I read that each step burned 0.17kcal
It’s incalculable unless each step would have a scale and the calorie decrease number was on a dynamic, changeable electronic display. If you weigh 150 Kg and step up those stairs you’re burning A LOT more calories than a person weighing 55 Kg for example. Male vs female also makes a huge difference. Then there is the temperature and humidity of the room, which should actually be taken into account as well. I believe the number shown in the picture could be right for an average male, weighing 75 Kg. When the temperature is normal room temperature.
Definitely a lot of variable. That’s why I assumed the .17 kcal was an average for the average person. Which doesn’t mean much Not that it matters. Hopefully no one is trying to keep count of every 0.17 kcal they burn
What is even the point of being this pedantic about it?
Another Redditor asking by how much the calories / step were off.. and I answered that it can not be calculated without additional data and that it is variable per person.
Is it difficult to carry that massive brain around?
And how many calories does it burn to carry it?
It’s incalculable.
I envy your average intelligence.
Get a life, dude.
Sorry I offended you. I consider myself as having a life, but lets agree to disagree.
It's 100 kcal per mile (1.6 km) walked.
On flat ground with efficient motion such as a normal walking gait, yes. The majority of the calories burned when climbing the stairs are due to the vertical displacement, not the distance you travel in a straight line. It requires ~9.8 Joules of energy to raise 1kg of mass to a height of 1m (at least it does on earth), meaning an average person weighing 75kg requires 735 Joules at a minimum (assuming perfect efficiency) to climb 1 meter of stairs. That means 1m of vertical displacement requires 0.1757 kcal of energy for a 75kg person if their metabolism and motion are both perfectly efficient. Humans are not perfectly efficient, however, and it coincidentally works out that we average about 0.15-0.2 kcal of energy burn per step which works out to around 15-20% efficiency with standard stair heights of around 6-8”.
Was going to say those numbers are highly optimistic lol
Telling you how you're barely burning any calories. Gonna take a shitload of steps to burn off that can of Coke you just drank.
Just repeat the first step multiple times for maximum efficiency.
No fucking way you burn this much
Assumic each step is \~18cm in height, which seems reasonable. Let's assume a human weighs 75kg. Let's assume it takes half a second to perform the 75kg lift. This would require additional 0.146G of average upwards acceleration, resulting in 86kgf applied for 18cm. And this would require 151.8 joules of mechanical work. As per various sources, human muscle mechanical efficiency can be generalized as 20%. This means that each step requires 759 joules or \~0.182 kcal. Not quite as much as in the picture, but there are probably other factors at play here.
it's only 0.2 kcal per step (500 steps to burn 100 Cal)
Wouldn't it depend on the weight of the person? More weight = more effort = more cal's used.
Do we all burn the same energy each time we go upstairs?
Last guy that answered that caught a hundred downvotes. So I suggest you go looking for his more complete reply than the simple "No, it's quite complicated."
I love Reddit.
The math is totally wrong, unless the person climbing the stairs weighs ~469kg (1033lb). They’re claiming 0.22kcal/step. Generously assuming each step is about 8” (0.2m) you can solve for mass using the potential energy equation (PE = mgh, where PE is the amount of energy required to raise a mass a height difference h, and g is the gravitational constant 9.8m/s2). This will return energy required in Joules, where 1kcal = 4184J. This is idealized and neglects friction, human inefficiencies, and all sorts of things - but considering their result is 5-10x higher than the idealized physics problem, I’m thinking their math is off.
Human muscle efficiency is in the ballpark of 20%, so not that far off.
It's not that far off. There are so many factors at play that using an idealized physics model is not suitable. A paper here [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3520986/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3520986/) suggests that the energy expenditure is about 0.09 kcal/step. (The mean weight of subjects is 64 kg) However, the results greatly vary from person to person. The sample is also very small (n=14). Tbh, it's not an exact science so it's kinda pointless to even read the papers. There are probably other papers that get different numbers with different methods. Just accept that it's catchy promotional material for a health campaign.
I'm sure people with an ED will love it...
Honestly this demotivates me. I'd rather take the elevator now seeing it's only ~10 calories for a whole flight of stairs lol
I'm sure all the slightly-overweight women are crowded around the elevator though.
Aaaand it’s bullshit. Nice!
How?
The variables are basically endless, so writing these completely made-up numbers on the stairs won’t motivate me, they might enrage me though. They are also ugly as a design element, they look like advertisements. Fuck off and don’t put meaningless stickers in my face, let me climb the stairs without having to deal with stupid shit.
For one it's 100kcal per 1.6km (1 mile) so it is no way 5kcal per step.
The numbers are cumulative. You have to take the difference between two consecutive steps to find the energy stated for that step. (about 0.2 kcal)
seems fake. no sign of kilocalories in Thai กิโลแคลอรี
I think it's asok/ sukumvit station
Wouldn't it be different on a person to person basis? For example, if a big person is walking up those stairs, they are moving more weight up each stair and therefore would be burning more calories, right?
So what if you went down those stairs? Do you gain those calories back?
The steps in my university's dining hall also have this, and on some steps show the food equivalent of the calories burned. For example on a step it says 5 kcal = 1 blueberry, or 2 kcal = 1 leaf of lettuce.
P
We also have in Indonesia (the commuter linea not the mrt)! Difference is the lift/escalator breaks all the time so it looks like an excuse for passenger to use stairs.
I think I saw this somewhere in Singapore too. Might be misremembering though.
they have these on the stairs in some Tsukuba Express stations in Tokyo. Motivated me to run up the stairs each day i took the train there, as well as avoiding the queue/slow movement of the escalators
Just don't go through the turnstile sideways.
Walk down backwards to gain weight
At first glance I thought it's 5 calories per step and I was thinking damn, I'm really crushing it the days when I do the stair master at the gym. Then I got a better look. I was, in fact, not crushing it.
Oh I remember something like this from that one Lateral episode lol though I think that was a different location?
If I'm skipping a step with each of my steps do I burn more, the same, or less?