Tag: Lulu hunt peters

In the late 19th century, a Wesleyan University chemist named Wilbur Olin Atwater pioneered the scientific measurement of food energy, a concept that would later evolve into modern calorie counting. His work laid the foundation for the practice, which was then popularized for the masses by early 20th-century author Lulu Hunt Peters.

The modern unit of a food calorie, or kilocalorie, was originally a unit of heat used for steam engines in the 19th century. The journey of this physics term into a household health metric reveals the surprising story of where did calorie counting come from and how it shaped dieting for over a century.

The word "calorie" was first defined in the 1820s by French chemist Nicolas Clément, though the practice of using calories for nutrition and weight management did not become popular until much later. The story of when did people first start counting calories reveals a complex journey from engineering laboratories to public health campaigns and weight-loss trends.