Thermic Effect

lostinwebspace

Hi everyone, this may seem like a 101 questions, but a term that's always confused me is "thermic effect." I've read that protein has the highest thermic effect of the macronutrients. What exactly does that term mean?

ruggedshutter

per Wikipedia...

"Thermic effect of food (abbreviated as TEF), also known as specific dynamic action (SDA) of a food or dietary induced thermogenesis (DIT), is the amount of energy expenditure above the resting metabolic rate due to the cost of processing food for use and storage.[1] Simply, it's the energy used in digestion, absorption and distribution of nutrients.[2] It is one of the components of metabolism along with resting metabolic rate and the exercise component. A commonly used estimate of the thermic effect of food is about 10% of one's caloric intake, though the effect varies substantially for different food components. For example, dietary fat is very easy to process and has very little thermic effect, while protein is hard to process and has a much larger thermic effect.[3]"

lostinwebspace

Ok, so essentially thermic effect is how easy/hard something is to digest?

kindrabbit

Is this the same theory as 'you loose weight if you eat celery because it contains fewer calories than you expend while eating it'?

lostinwebspace

I don't really pay attention to negative calories. No point. It's not gonna have much effect.

MoiAussi93

It takes the body more energy to digest and process protein than it does carbohydrates or fat. As a result, fewer of the calories you consume from protein are actually available to fuel your body or be stored as fat because a larger percentage of those calories are used just to digest it.