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Comment by verytrivial

3 years ago

In the context of nutrition the word calories always means dietary calories, so the kilo- prefix is redundant unless discussing physics, or commenting on HN...Ooooh, ok.

The practice of indicating kcals as "Calories" always seemed to be an American thing to me. I don't know how widespread this is outside the US but there are plenty of countries that use "kcal" in nutritional tables and such. People will still colloquially confuse calories and kilocalories a lot but that's largely due to bad translations (similar to mistranslating short billions).

  • In Poland you write "100 kcal" but say "100 kalorii" unless it's in scientific context.

  • People everywhere mix those 2 regularly and nobody is confused. You don't say you go out for a run to burn some kilo calories and so on. Sometimes places like HN are needlessly pedantic

    • If someone explicitly writes "160 000" calories I'm going to assume they meant 160 kcal.