HELP -- Nutrition Facts on Products

There is soemthing that's been puzzling me for a long, long time. You know those nutrition tables on products? They show the energy values in kCal/kJoule. I don't understand what those mean. Is a kCal the same as a calorie? Or should I multiply the kCal value by a thousand to get the calorie value? Enlighten me, please.

a kcal is a calorie, is a calorie... some countries use kilojoules.. big difference in the numbers if you're using kilojoules though :)

All right. I'm in Turkey right now and here, the nutrition label on a can of Coca-Cola Light (which is the same as U.S. Diet Coke) says that the can contains 0.4 kCal per 100 g. So, is this the same as 0.4 calories (like the "calories" this site talks about)?

Food energy is measured in calories. A kcal is a kilocalorie, which means it's 1000 calories. The nutrition labels report Calories (yes, the capital letter makes a different here). A Calories is the same as a kcal. Pretty much everything you'll see on fitness and nutrition is in Calories, though most of the time the lower case calorie is used. In Europe, kcal is more common on labels, which is just a terminology change.

And yes, 0.4 kcal is the same as 0.4 calories in the US. The US has a lot of guidelines about nutritional labels involving being able to call something zero when there's a very small amount (so that 0.4 calories would be reported in the US as zero). For example, trans fats don't have to be reported on a label if a serving has less than 0.5g of them.