Energy value of dishes and food products — 200 dishes, 300 products
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The calorie (technically a kilocalorie in nutrition labeling) is a unit of energy that measures how much fuel a food provides to the body. Modern calorie counting traces back to chemist Wilbur Atwater's late-19th-century experiments burning food samples to measure the heat they released, work that still underpins the nutrition labels found on packaged food today.
A useful mental model is energy balance: eating roughly as many calories as the body uses in a day tends to keep weight stable, while a sustained surplus or deficit shifts it up or down over time. Because portion sizes and recipes vary so much from one kitchen to the next, calorie figures for home-cooked dishes are always closer to an estimate than a precise measurement, while packaged foods with a printed label tend to be more exact.
Counting calories is one of the simplest ways to get a rough sense of an eating pattern without tracking every gram of protein, fat and carbohydrate separately, which is why it remains the starting point for most diet and fitness apps. Looking a meal up before eating it, rather than after, also tends to make portion sizes easier to judge.