Why does fat contain twice as many calories per unit weight as carbohydrates?
- Saturday Oct 10,2009 09:00 AM
- By diddy
- In Others
Why does fat contain twice as many calories per unit weight as carbohydrates? How do they react with water and why does this give fat the advantage for storage?
Advantage, Carbohydrates, Fat Calories, Storage, Unit Weight
One Comment
Simply put, both fats and carbs provide energy (calories) through chemical reactions with oxygen from the blood ("burning") to produce carbon dioxide CO2 (or O-C-O) and water.
Carbs already contain roughly one O (oxygen) atom for every C (carbon) atom, whereas fats contain relatively few O atoms.
Gram for gram, fats and carbs contain roughly the same number of carbon atoms.
So when fats burn they form roughly twice as many C-O bonds as carbs do. That releases twice as much energy.
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