Negative Calorie Foods

Negative calorie foods are an intriguing concept: you eat them and they burn more calories than they contain. Here is why they don’t work and still can help you in losing weight.

The Concept Of Negative Calorie Foods

These days you find whole lists of these foods on the Internet, and they contain anything from apples to strawberries and tomatoes. The most popular example of a negative calorie food is celery, those stalks that contain high amounts of fiber, are hard to chew and have only very few calories – a 2.2 oz stalk has only 9 kcal.

The reasoning of negative calorie food fans now goes as follows: Because celery has so much fiber and is hard to digest, the process of digestion costs the body more than those nine kcal.

There is only problem with this: When the caloric contents of a food are calculated, the energy the body uses for digesting it, called the “thermal effect of food” (TEF), is already taken into account.

Still Useful

Still, although these foods don’t truly do what they are advertised with, they can still help you in losing weight.

Negative calorie food lists usually contain vegetables and fruits and mostly these are high in volume, but low in caloric content. By switching to these foods, you don’t burn more than they contain, but they may have a lot fewer calories than what you used to eat.

As an example, and going back to the celery, a 2.2 oz stalk of it has 9 kcal, while a 2.2 oz chocolate bar has around 300. If you manage to eat ten of those celery stalks you consume approximately 90 kcal, while for the chocolate bars it is 3,000.

Video

Here is the video discussing the concept: