Recently got some burritos from a food bank and while looking for cooking directions I found this nutrition chart. Never seen a food product use anything other than calories for energy, thought it was interesting.
this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2024
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It's extremely confusing but there are basically 2 measurements systems for food energy:
There's kilocalories (abbreviated as cal) and there's kilojoules (abbreviated as kJ). It can get very confusing because some places will label them calories (cal) and Calories (kJ), lower and upper case respectively which is extremely confusing because 1 kJ is equivalent to 4.81 cal.
According to Wikipedia the US and Canada use kilocalories (cal or calories) and pretty much the rest of the world uses kilojoules (kJ or Calories).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_energy#Nutrition_labels
The main difference between the two is that kilocalories are a measure of heat energy, where 1 kilocalorie is the heat needed to warm 1 liter of water by 1 degree celcius. Whereas a kilojoule is a measure of energy usually described by force in newtons.
They're both actually from the metric system, but kilocalorie is the old and obsolete form while kilojoules is the currently accepted metric measurement.
What? I've never seen anything other than kilocalorie in western countries.
Well it seems like Wikipedia's list of countries is pretty sparse. They only have USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, UK, EU, and Brazil.