“Make your swear words count.”

As outlandish as it may seem, I have said that more than once to the junior high school students I teach. But before you race to the next school board meeting demanding my dismissal, realize that I took my own words out of context to accomplish exactly what swear words are designed to do: draw additional attention to the matter at hand.

If this use shocks or offends, so be it. That’s often the plan.

When I offer such advice, I am not, repeat not, advocating the use of swear words. In fact, I refrain from vocalizing the most vulgar ones myself.

I’m simply passing along what the most effective speakers and writers know: overusing words sap them of their inherent strength.

That’s why I’m ambivalent about this column’s title featuring the phrase “all calories are not equal.” The saying has been overworked and therefore weakened, yet it’s still true.

And when the idea behind it is fully explained, it can really be a help to you.

For years, nutritionists believed the opposite: that “a calorie is a calorie is a calorie.” That’s why in 2003, a diet book titled The Fast Food Diet actually made many bestseller lists.

With these sorts of diets, it didn’t really matter what you ate, only that you ate less. Far less. So if you wanted to eat absolute junk, go for it — as long as you were only eating 800 to 1200 calories a day, approximately half the total needed to maintain the weight of an average-sized and fairly active female.

But we now know that the body prefers certain types of calories for certain types of jobs, making the type of calorie in many instances even more important for weight loss or weight maintenance than the number of them. Most of the times when I have helped someone lose weight, as a matter of fact, the diet used contained more total calories than the one that created the unwanted weight. (In the name of full disclosure, it must be noted that the volume and intensity of exercise at this time usually increased to some degree along with calorie consumption, too.)

Almost all of those calories, however, were “good” ones: high-quality proteins, healthy fats, fibrous vegetables full of complex carbs, and even some natural, simple carbs — but virtually no overly processed, “crappy” ones. (I want to shock a bit yet still maintain a level of decorum, so I’ll use one word and let you figure out the swear word.)

Consume too high a percentage of “crappy” carbs and they won’t satiate your appetite; they will stimulate it. Studies have documented this numerous times in the past.

More recently, additional research added another troubling fact: the “crappiest” of all the overly processed simple carbs could very well be the ones coming from sugar-sweetened beverages because they can create serious health problems for you even if they don’t cause you to gain weight.

At least that was the determination of 22 researchers who pieced together a position paper for the May issue of Obesity Reviews. After a thorough view of the available research, all 22 agreed that sugar-sweetened beverages not only increase the chance of weight gain, but also that when they do not, they still increase the risk of cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes.

Lead author of the review, Kimber Stanhope, a research nutritional biologist with the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of California, Davis, put it this way for Medical News Today: “What’s new is that this is an impressive group of scientists with vast experience in nutrition and metabolism agreeing with the conclusion that sugar-sweetened beverages increase cardiovascular risk factors compared to equal amounts of starch.”

What’s also new is this year’s estimate that nearly half of the average American’s added sugar intake comes from beverages. And don’t forget: calories you drink don’t register in your body as calories consumed, which increases the odds that you’ll take in too many.

What’s important to realize about the determination of the 22 researchers is the fact that some types of starches — like white potatoes and pastas — are viewed by many as questionable food choices. But these questionable choices are still technically complex carbohydrates, which actually fortifies the not-all-calories-are-equal argument.

Other research from earlier this year also showed another disturbing way in which not all calories are equal. According to researchers at the University of Bonn in Germany, eating the typical Western diet that features many highly processed and nutritionally lacking foods can negatively alter your immune system.

Worse, the paper published in the journal Cell found that reverting back to a healthy diet does not appear to undo the damage.

And it’s the sort of damage that makes the immune system so responsive to inflammation that it probably increases the odds that type 2 diabetes and heart disease occur.