I work at a power plant, and it takes energy (calories) to heat water up. It takes 1 BTU to raise the temperature of ~1.9 Cups of water by 1°F. So if you heat 1.9 cups of water up from 33°F to 98.5°F, it would have taken 65.5 BTUs. if you convert 65.5 BTUs to calories it is 16516.76 calories. What am I missing? this doesn't make sense. Does anybody that would know more about food calorie content, conversion and nutrition have an answer for me?

1 Calorie (for nutritional purposes) is equal to 1 kilocalorie or 1000 calories (a unit often used in physical sciences, and the energy required to raise 1 g of water by 1 degree Celcius at standard temperature and pressure). Note the capitalization of Calorie vs. calorie -- these are two different units.

So if your calculations are correct, that process takes 65.5 BTU = 16517 cal = 16.517 kcal = 16.517 Cal.

So, in terms of the Calories used on this site, it would require 16.5 Calories to heat up that water.

Of course, in order to keep things from being too simple, colloquially, "Calories" are often referred to with a lower case c. When you see people talking about counting calories, or burning calories, etc., on here, what they are really talking about is Calories.

damn! i thought i was going to lose tons of weight by just eating ice cream!

^^ THIS ^^

Wow, I always like to see I am not alone in calculating the amount of calories consumed by the temperature increase of drinking ice water. I did the numbers several years ago and I would need to do them again to remember my basis, but I had concluded that if you drank X number of cups of ice water a day you would lose ??? 7 pounds??? over the course of a year. In the end it was such an inconsequential number that I did not feel it was relevant. I wish I had saved my calcs.

Generally speaking, if I do not drink water I do not lose weight and personally, I prefer cold water.

It doesn't make enough of a difference to matter. Drink your beverages at whatever temperature is comfortable for you.

There maybe energy required to heat the water, but it is such a low amount it would easily negated / overtaken by simple environmental factors. By comparison, washing dishes by hand rather than putting them in the dishwasher burns 26 Cal.


But this eclipsed by fidgetting (fiddling with things, tapping toes, etc etc) which can quite easily burn through hundreds of calories a day.

From http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=99521

In an important study in 1986 by Eric Ravussin, 177 subjects stayed, one at a time, for 24 hours inside a special 10 x 12-foot respiratory chamber that measures all the calories you burn while you are in the chamber. The subjects in the study slept, ate, exercised on a stationary bike, and were allowed to move around in the chamber as much as they liked. Despite the fact that all of the subjects spent the same amount of time in exactly the same confined space, the results showed large differences in the number of calories they burned. Some subjects burned as few as 1,300 calories in 24 hours, while others burned as much as 3,600 calories, a difference of 2,300 calories in one 24-hour period! The scientists concluded that, even when they adjusted for differences in muscle mass, the only explanation could be the amount the subjects fidgeted (sometimes called spontaneous physical activity). They based their conclusions on the fact that the subjects who burned the most calories were restless, paced, played cards, and generally spent less time sitting or lying in bed while those who burned the fewest calories spent the majority of their time sitting, watching TV, and napping. In general, men burned more calories than women, not only because they weighed more and had more muscle but because they fidgeted more.

In a similar study, identical twins were confined to a college dormitory for 100 days. The food they ate was carefully measured for caloric intake, and they exercised by being taken out for the same walks. On 80 of the days, everyone was overfed by 1,000 calories to induce them all to gain weight. They all did gain weight, and theoretically, since they all were fed the same number of excess calories and did the same amount of exercise, it would be expected that they would all gain the same amount of weight. But they didn't. The weight gain ranged from 9.5 to 29 pounds. The researchers concluded that the subjects who gained the least amount of weight fidgeted more, plus there may have been other genetic factors involved in how they store fat.