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We're going to take one on them, see how much it weighs. Okay. I'm not happy with the size of this almond because it's

touching the edges of the capsule. So I'm going to take a smaller piece. I'm smaller.

I'm standing in a government laboratory in Belsville, Maryland, with Teresa Henderson, a scientist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. She's sizing up a Ziploc bag of almonds that I brought here with me as a snack. I've just asked her if we could do a little experiment to figure out how many calories

are in my almonds.

There's a half one, but that might be too small.

I can cut it.

Calories are everywhere.

They're listed on the packaging of your favorite junk food and on the menus at chain restaurants.

Apps like My Fitness Pal and Noom exist mainly to track exactly how many calories

you eat each day. There are numbers that a lot of us spend a lot of time considering. I know I do.

A banana has about 100 calories. A slice of bacon has 43, if you can eat just one.

These numbers are treated like gospel. But have you ever stopped to think? Where do they come from?

Figuring that out is what brought me here to this USDA lab.

This was the start of a journey into the world of diets, where I quickly learned that a lot of the

things we think of as fact are a lot more complicated,

including the calorie.

But first, back to our little science experiment with Teresa.

She's about to explode my almond, literally, to figure out how many calories are in it.

...