Calories are standard only because they are easy to measure.

Doesn't take into account the metabolic costs of digestion or the myriad antinutrients plants contain. Or their interactions.

Weight gain in rats as a fraction of mass of food consumed for a particular diet is a much better metric.

(Yes, rats nutrition is quite relevant to human nutrition. After the primates and the tree shrews, Rodentia are our closest living relatives).

Yeah, I am aware of why we use calories, and I understand it's importance, but I think the use case in this above example is kinda redundant, that's really what I was getting at.

However, I still don't think it's a great metric when thinking about nutrition, too reductive, it also doesn't take into account the variety of other vitamins, minerals and chemicals consumed from certain food groups which the body might benefit or draw harm from. Nutrition is kinda hard to draw scientific concensus on, I would go so far as saying it is something of a "sudo science", (or at least it has been in the past, things seem to be improving) especially as it seems that there are certain food groups which benefit certain portions of humanity better than others. 🤷🏻‍♂️

"Don't consistently eat more calories than you burn in a day" is a big part of the story, but it's not the whole story.

Ah yeah, the water content is an issue with mass 😅

most of the protein is from soybeans i think, which is now mostly quite contaminated with residues from years of glyphosate and the beans themselves are mostly GMO, i personally get an allergic reaction from eating much of it and my cat refuses to eat it (and i've had other cats who also refused to eat it)

fat is another one, likely rapeseed is number one, second would be sunflower, and then probably refined olive oil, and then below that butter/cream and tallow

for some reason there is almost no palm oil anymore, until about 4 years ago it was one of the most common

the heat and chemical extracted rapeseed and sunflower oil are greatly increasing inflammatory chronic disease and harm nerve function, as well as damage the liver, and increase oxidative free radicals in brain tissue, which is supposed to be primarily saturated fats and medium chain triglycerides, and the disappearance of tallow (beef fat mainly, but also sheep) is affecting us because at least one thing - that is also in chocolate - stearic acid, which is a key precursor for the hormone that signals satiety

that stearic acid is a major part of why carnivore people so often report finding they are actually eating less food and their weight is normalising