What is an empty calorie?  Wait a minute … there are empty calories?  Aren’t all calories equal?  A calorie is a calorie, right?   Wrong.  The caloric measurement of food only tells us about the heat that a specific portion of a food can generate.  It says nothing about what the nutritional value of the food is. 

Calories tell us nothing about nutrition.  A food’s caloric value tells you nothing about its vitamin content, mineral content, polyphenol content, amino acid, and lipid content.  Nothing.

So, what’s an empty calorie?   It’s a food portion with little or no nutritional content. 

Equal calories … hugely different nutrition profile.  Here is a real-life comparison of empty calorie food vs. nutrition packed food where both have the same caloric value.  Imagine eating two Twinkies for breakfast, lunch, and dinner today.  How does that make you feel? 

Now imagine enjoying an Elements Meal for breakfast, lunch, and dinner today.  Same calories.  Vastly different nutrition story!  Over time, this is the difference between suffering chronic diseases and being vibrantly healthy.  The difference is the foods’ nutritional values.

Like the Twinkie, the American diet consists of drinks and foods that are heavy on empty calories.  You can always identify empty calories (garbage) when the “food” you’re thinking about eating is loaded with sugar (or sugar substitutes), refined carbohydrates (think pastas and breads), and unhealthy fat (think unsaturated fats).  Again … think Twinkie.  

Examples of empty calorie food garbage:

• breakfast bars, energy bars, granola bars, fruit yogurts
• carbohydrate-based desserts, like cakes, cookies, biscuits, crackers, donuts, muffins
• sugary drinks, including soda, energy drinks, and fruit juice
• candy bars, chocolate bars, and hard candies
• jerky and other processed meats
• fatty products like shortening
• processed oils like soybean and canola oil
• flavor adders like barbeque sauces and ketchups
• “fast food” … burgers, wraps, pizza, and the like

How many empty calories do American adults eat every day?   In 2012, the Agriculture Research Service (part of the USDA) discovered that “snacks” provided one-third of all daily calories from “empty calories” (32% for women and 31% for men). 

“The average intake of empty calories for men aged 20 and older surveyed was 923 calories per day…. For women aged 20 and older, the average intake of empty calories was 624 calories per day.”

Read the study results here:  

Kids and empty calories.  A 2010 study found that about 40% of the total calories that children aged 2–18 in the United States consume are empty calories. The source of that food junk?  The major sources soda, grain desserts and crackers, pizza, and whole milk.

Our  commitment to you is providing the best quality, nutrition-packed food anywhere. To fulfill that commitment, we promise you the following:

Promise #1.  The quality of our ingredients is, and will always be, superlative.  No compromises. 

Promise #2.  We will always use the world’s best nutrition preservation technology.  Always. 

Promise #3.  Every Elements Meal is hand-crafted and hand-packed to ensure the individual quality of every single meal you purchase.  We hand pull all our animal proteins.  We hand cut all our fresh vegetables.  And every single Elements Meal is individually hand-assembled. 

Our promises give you the daily confidence that your nutritional needs are covered anytime, anywhere. Now you never have to compromise. Eat your Elements!

We do all of this because WE LOVE YOU!