I think the focus on "burning" calories completely misses the mark. It gives people the misconception that food is nothing more than calories, and they can just "burn" off the excess, despite the fact that our nutritional needs become more important with exercise.

But isn't too many calories a way, way bigger problem today than not enough micronutrients is? If we could make the former way better at the expense of making the latter slightly worse, it seems like it'd be a no-brainer.

Yes, for certain. I am more alluding to the false belief that you can just out-exercise a poor diet. For example, many polyunsaturated vegetable oils oxidize very quickly in your body, sending free radicals on a rampage and causing inflammation. This "cost" is not accounted for in a calorie. And the effect becomes even more important when you introduce the stress of exercise into the equation.

https://www.openventio.org/Volume1-Issue6/Oxidation-of-Polyu...

True. But calorie as a metric doesn't help either. It's too abstract. Instead, what if it were minutes? As in you'd have to walk for X minutes to burn off those super sized fries and shake. If a meals takes idk 4 hrs to burn off and you only have 3 extra hours in the evening...well, that would be better than calories.

Calories are a scientific unit. They don't work for every day people leading every day lives.

Those 12 minutes never happen, meanwhile drinking more than one can happens all the time.