High Protein Shake Recipe
Saturated Fats
Fat-Burning FoodsEnergy
Everything that goes into your stomach is mixed with enzymes, chemicals that break food into its basic components to make it easy for your body to generate energy. You ask what gives the human body energy? When your body needs energy, you feel hungry. The amount of energy you need and use is measured in calories.
A thousand calories make up a kilocalorie (kcal) or Calorie (with a capital C). When people use the word "calorie" in ordinary speech, they mean kilocalories. When we refer to calories, written with a small c, we mean kcal. Energy may also be measured in joules or thousands of joules (kilojoules or kj). One kcal is equivalent to 4.2 kj.
Calories are often used as a negative term, with people worrying about taking in too many. When people talk about having "lots of energy" , they mean that they feel healthy. In nutritional terms, however, energy and calories are actually the same thing.
energy in a human body
Your body needs energy for life. All your activities consume energy. You also need body energy to breath, digest and absorb food and maintain your body temperature. The rate at which you use energy is known as your metabolic rate. Your resting metabolic rate (RMR) is the number of kilocalories or kilojoules that you use just by existing (breathing, pumping blood around your body, etc.) and represents about 70 per cent of your total energy expenditure. Any activity, no matter how small, will use energy. The more activities you do, the more calories you burn up.
what gives the human body energy
Energy in your diet is provided by carbohydrate, fat, protein and alcohol. Almost all the weight of a food is made up of these components plus water. Foods that contain a lot of water, which has no calorific value, such as many fruits and vegetables, will have less protein, fat or carbohydrate for a given weight and will therefore also be low in calories. A fatty food, such as butter, which contains relatively little water, will be rich in calories. The energy or calorific value of the food components is given in the table below.
body energy requirement
The estimated average requirements (EARs) for energy show the amount of energy needed by men and women of average weights, with sedentary occupations, who do not do much exercise. If your level of activity increases, either at work or because you start to take more exercise, your total energy requirement will increase too.
Your energy requirements change at different stages of your life, for example, growth requires a lot of energy. A child uses up less energy than an adult. However, if you compare energy requirements per kilogram of body weight, a child actually uses up a higher proportion of energy per body weight than an adult. After maturity, the adult energy requirement is fairly constant, but shows a slight, and continuing, decline after reaching the age of 30.
