The general rule is that the slower the calorie burn rate, the more nutritional value and the faster the calorie burn rate, the less nutrition. Refined starches and refined sugars provide no significant nutritional value. In fact, they burn various kinds of the bodies stored nutrition to give your that 'amped' feeling. Further, over reliance on these 'empty calories' may produce a chemically induced manic - depressive cycle which can easily lead to poor judgment and physical injury.
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Glycemic index on Wikipedia Glycemic Index Food Chart
Pack Food
We took this estimate, added a bit of cushion to bring it to 3000 calories/person-day, and rationed this amount of food for our 2-month Alaska peninsula trip. What we didn't think about is the enormous calorie difference between what we thought we'd eat and what hiking all day should burn. All that has to come from somewhere, and it was coming off our fat reserves.
The upshot of this is that our estimate worked great for the first couple weeks, ok for the next couple weeks, and went downhill from there. By the end of the first month of hiking we were quite hungry on our rations, and ravenously devoured as much as possible at every town we stopped in. For the very last segment of the trip, we bought as much extra food as we could carry in the tiny Port Heiden grocery store, and ate as much as we wanted. This time it came out to about 5000 calories/person-day between the two of us - much closer to the calculated number burned.
Currently, I add about 500 calories to the daily estimate (for 2 people) for each week we're going to be hiking. The specific number depends a lot on the metabolism of the people concerned, but it's important to remember that longer hikes require more food per day than shorter ones.
The Lightest Backpacking Food
If you really want to go light on your backpacking food, there are two other tricks to use. The first is called carbo-loading. You essentially avoid carbohydrates for a week or so, and then eat a lot of them in the two days prior to your trip, causing you body to store them. With this routine, your body can store up to 1,800 calories of carbs in your blood, liver and muscles, in the form of glycogen. That means you can pack less food (okay, it only gets you half-day's worth).
