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Super Smash Bros. creator Masahiro Sakurai has confirmed that the recovery you get from food found in Smash and Kirby Air Riders is actually calculated based on the real-life calories of said foods.
One of the easiest ways to figure out if you're playing a Masahiro Sakurai game – aside from great UI, a checklist mode, and generally being a banger – is the inclusion of random food JPEGs as healing items. Instead of modelling foods for the Smash Bros. fighters to eat, random photographs will appear on the stage instead. This was carried over into Kirby Air Riders and is such an iconic part of the game that Nintendo made some of these foods available as Switch player icons. But it turns out the food is deeper than we thought.
The Kirby Air Riders Twitter account (via The Gamer) recently made a post highlighting the iconic healing items and mentions, "Different types also offer different amounts of healing...maybe it has to do with the calories or something?" Sakurai chimes in, quoting the Japanese account's post about the food, and saying (via machine translation) that the amount of health recovered by food in the Super Smash Bros. series is also roughly in line with the amount of calories the actual food has.
Previously, the Super Smash Bros. for Wii U Food Trophy (thanks SmashWiki) said that "the fancier the food, the more damage it will heal," noting that bread will heal 10 damage while a roast chicken will heal 15 points. So the writing has been on the wall somewhat, but this is the first time it's been outright stated that these are calculated via the amount of calories. Although given the amount of attention to detail found in Sakurai games generally, I can't say this surprises me at all.
