fitday.com calculations? Confused, help

**Ralphie** · 12-24-2009, 02:08 PM

Ok, I've recently started using fitday.com to track my daily calories as its far easier and less time consuming than manually writing everything out like I used to...

However, when i do the math I seem to notice that they count fiber towards my overall calories for the day....

I'm confused.... am I missing something here? Am I just being an idiot?
I've done the math, and it seems like they are actually trying to count fiber as calories... I mean you'd think a site thats established like this would have tackled this problem by now, so thats why I'm second guessing it.. perhaps I'm just making some obvious blunder.

Thoughts?

**Prince** · 12-26-2009, 09:49 AM

I have not used that site in years, but that is pretty interesting, fiber is non-digestible and technically does not count towards calorie count.

**Built** · 12-26-2009, 10:15 AM

It actually does, to an extent, contribute to your overall caloric intake. Lyle McD wrote something on this a while back; I'll try to track it down and post the link. I seem to recall it basically works out to about one calorie per gram.

**Ralphie** · 12-26-2009, 11:48 AM

haha Really?
I've never heard that, but that is interesting.

The site is otherwise flawless and very time saving.
I recently switched to it, as I usually track my calories everyday, but using the site it takes sooooooooo much less time.

**Built** · 12-26-2009, 11:56 AM

Ralphie - my suggestion to you is to just take the numbers fitday gives you as if they are correct. Wrong-but-consistent will still get you to where you want to be.

**Built** · 12-26-2009, 12:38 PM

Here we go - I found it: Calories, Nutrients or Food | BodyRecomposition - The Home of Lyle McDonald

"It’s generally stated that humans don’t derive any calories from fiber, since we lack the enzymes necessary to break it down like cows. This isn’t strictly speaking true, our lower intestine may break down fiber to short chain fatty acids which are used for energy by the micro-organisms living in our gut.

Although there is ongoing debate in this area, a caloric value of 1.5-2 cal/gram for fiber is the currently accepted value. Even then, since a fiber intake for most people these days probably doesn’t top 25 grams/day, that’s only about 35-50 calories total per day. A massive 100 grams of fiber/day (you’d have to eat a tree) would 150-200 calories which would be significant.

For all practical purposes, unless your fiber intake is ungodly high, we can ignore the caloric content of fiber. You can also ignore the fiber grams for carbohydrate count if you’re keeping track of those for some reason (such as a ketogenic diet)."

**tailender1** · 12-26-2009, 12:53 PM

This site is pretty interesting. By the way as a website developer i can say that most of the website have glitches in their system. Also see their disclaimer

**Zeus100** · 01-04-2010, 04:32 PM

It has to count the calories of fiber, because it honours food lables and food labels require it to identify the energy "potential" of the food, not neccesarily the energy derived from the food. It has to do with the method used to determine the caloric potential of foods in current labeling practices. (there have been several posts on why food labling isn't perfect in this regard). If you google "food labels" or even just search for them here, you'll probably find a link that explains it.

If your using Fitday to estimate daily calories burned, it will add a factor in to your caloric burn to account for the digestability of your foods. Not sure it make up the difference, but it does take it into account.

Also, consistency is the key. If you to generally eat the same about of fiber/day it doesn't matter if it calculates a caloric value for them, what matters is that you hit your target. If you decide one day to replace all your fiber with sugar and you'll need to take the digestable calories into account.

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