“Perhaps.”

It’s a word used when you do not want be too definitive or too assertive, when you want to convey possibility rather than certainty. While it sounds more refined, it really means the same as “maybe.”

So what in the world is it doing in the following sentence? “A [new] era of research is making it clear that perhaps not all calories are created equal.”

Perhaps? If the sentence was created for this column, you’d would not see the more cultured cousin of “maybe” in it. You’d see “beyond a doubt” instead.

Despite that, I don’t see Matthew Kadey, the writer of the sentence, as a crackpot, but as someone who has to cover his butt. From his byline, you learn he’s part of the medical establishment, an MPH and a RDN, so he needs to remain with those bounds.

Kadey’s article appears in this month’s issue of Environmental Nutrition and comes with an equally questionable subtitle: “In the weight loss equation are calories still king?” That question yields such an obvious answer that, in my opinion, it’s not really worth asking.

But who am I?

Certainly not the editor of a highly respected publication with impressive initials after my name, like PhD and RDN. And certainly not some jerk who holds it against either the writer or the editor for following standard scientific protocol and avoiding the use of absolutes until they are painfully obvious.

But I also understand that if you’re unhappily overweight or adversely affecting health because of it, you can’t afford to wait several more years for multiple studies to create a consensus.

So I’m here to declare what in all likelihood Matthew Kadey and his editor would like to: that in the land of Weight Loss, Nutrient Partitioning has seized the throne and serves as king.

To explain why nutrient partitioning works, let me tell a story that’s probably 20 years old. Two nationally ranked wrestlers who were brothers needed to drop three pounds in one week. Their father didn’t want them starving themselves or spending time in a sweat box, so he asked for my advice.

During our discussion, I discovered that both boys actually liked the taste of raw cauliflower and didn’t mind eating popcorn air-popped and dry.

So for a week, the boys ate mostly that and little else. (If I had to do it again, the boys would eat at least two egg-white omelets of at least three whites a piece each day, as well.)

Both comfortably dropped the weight by eating whenever they felt hungry and without counting calories.

Both were not yet 10 and not yet 70 pounds, so the three-pound weight loss was significant and would’ve approached 10 pounds if the boys had been typical middle-aged males accustomed to eating a typical American diet.

Now let’s delve into the Kadey’s article for insight into why the cauliflower-popcorn combo (and the use of nutrient patritioning) was so effective. Kadey cites a study published in the Journal of Clinical Nutrition that found complex carbs create more of a caloric expenditure during digestion than simple carbs.

The researchers did so buy having subjects follow the same diet, except some of the subjects replaced the simple carbs in it with complex carbs. Those eating the complex carbs burned nearly 100 extra calories a day.

Why? “Your body has to work harder to digest a meal containing less processed carbs so will burn more calories to do so,” explains Samantha Cassetty, MS. RD, a weight loss expert quoted in Kadey’s article.

This is just one example of a key element to nutrient partitioning, the thermic effect of food. In short, your body needs to produce heat to break down and digest the macronutrients in foods, but only fat and simple carbs break down easily.

Complex carbs, fiber, and protein don’t.

And eating a complex carb like cauliflower raw makes the digestion even harder and the “waste” of calories even greater.

In a JAMA article Kadey cites, subjects whose daily diets consisted of 25 percent protein burned 227 more calories per day than those subjects who consumed the same number of calories but only 5 percent of their calories in protein. Cassetty explains this discrepancy by noting that in your body’s digestion of the meat of a chicken breast, up to 35 percent of those calories can be lost in the process.

But it’s not only the breakdown of foods that makes nutrient partitioning the best way to monitor your weight. It’s the fact that some calories just can’t be absorbed.

That’s the benefit of eating a high-fiber diet, but you probably knew that already. What you possibly didn’t know is what even researchers didn’t know until recently: that almost 30 percent of the calories in nuts pass through the body undigested.

When you eat foods and to what degree you could eat them are just two of the many other factors that have made the old saying “a calorie is a calorie is a calorie” as outdated as the manual typewriter and rotary phones.

So get with the times and get in the habit of using nutrient partitioning to piece together a diet that keeps your weight where you want it.