Owner - Operator Exercise Update Raleigh, North Carolina, United States
Disclosure(s):
Auston W. Cherbonneaux: No relevant financial relationship(s) with ineligible companies to disclose.
Objectives: The main objective of this study is to investigate if we accurately define the energy from nutrition. By comparing this caloric model of thermodynamics to the atomic models of modern physics that developed in the 1900's and continues to advance to this day, we can discover whether or not calories are truly an appropriate application of physics to nutrition, exercise, and biology.
Methods: Research was two fold: First, the history and transformed applications of calories from its original conception and definition (Antoine Lavoisier 1789) to its application to nutritional sciences (Rubner 1883 & Atwater 1897) in order to understand the history of this measurement. Second, comparing its constitution against the modern physics of the 21st century which begins with J.J. Thomson and the discovery of the electron (1897, ironically) and continues through the discoveries of Rutherford, Einstein, Bohr, and to the present day.
Results: Calories have been a measure of food energy via calorimetry and hypothetical biological combustion since at least 1897. Physics has advanced since 1897, and we have learned how atoms behave sub-atomically, the distinctly separate processing of carbon and oxygen in the mitochondria, and that the energy from ADP and Pi is from within its atomic structure. Modern physics tells us that the energy for nutrition comes from the energy inherent to all atoms: the movement of electrons.
Electron action drives all chemical and biochemical action. Around the protons and neutrons in the vibrating nucleus, the electrons dance, bind, and hybridize across orbitals and bonds of molecules, and this binding transforms the structure and electromagnetism of the molecules in action. All elements, and all the molecules they create, have energies from the motion of their electrons and from the patterns of electromagnetism that these electrons generate.
Conclusions: Biological energy is electrochemical in nature, not thermal, and it gets this energy from the electron action within atoms. Modern calorimetry does not illustrate the proper biophysics for nutrition, exercise, and biologic ecology. It is through material measurements (grams, moles), physiological understanding, and substance composition (macro, micro, atomic) that we will get the best understanding behind the biophysics of energy and its related applications in nutrition.
