Nature reviews Why Calories Count

NATURE, March 14, 2012, Review
(Books in Brief review (scroll down to the second one)

Why Calories Count: From Science to Politics

Marion Nestle and Malden Nesheim University of California Press 304 pp. $19.95 (2012)

Obesity has gone global — as has misinformation about nutrition and food. Nutrition scientists Marion Nestle and Malden Nesheim unscramble the confusion with a serving of science.

They reveal how calories — those potent but ill-understood measures of heat energy — are really counted, why we need them, how we use them, how many we actually need and why it all sometimes goes so wrong.