Nutritional information is a misleading term.  In practice, posting nutritional information is posting the amount of calories in particular food.  Nutrition, however, is not solely based on the amount of calories in a certain food.  There are two essential modern approaches to nutrition: the caloric approach and the micronutrient approach.  Increasingly, the micronutrient approach, which takes into account the nutrients in a particular food, is coming into the forefront of the field of nutrition in the United States.  From the micronutrient perspective, listing the calories is no longer an adequate measure of health.

For a word that’s thrown around so profusely, very few actually consider what a calorie  is.  Simply, a calorie is a unit of heat content or energy.  One calorie is the amount of heat required to raise 1 gram of water 1°C.  When speaking about calories in food we actually use Kilocalories (1000 small calories).  Note that…