Negative Calorie Foods

Hi there! A few things here:

-A calorie is a measurement of energy
-All food contain a known number of calories, determined by bomb calorimetry
-Only about 8% of your body's daily energy use is spent on food processing
-All of these are approximations depending on an individual's absorption of food and metabolism

So do any foods contain fewer calories than it takes the body to process them? No

However, some foods have a high water content - such as watermelon and cucumbers - or pass through your body largely undigested - such as lettuce and most other raw greens. These foods, if eaten raw, have very low calorie densities - meaning that even in large quantities, they will contribute few calories to your diet.

Yet another reason to eat your veggies! especially raw

utter horse ****....you it 5000 calories of any of those foods you will gain weight, if your body burnt that much eating we all wouldnt be trying to loose weight.

Those foods are great and good for you dont get me wrong but get the negative calorie crap outa your head

It's very hard to consume 5000 calories of those foods listed but you're correct. During this prep, I have consume around 50-75 grams of carbs from green veggies alone. Considering for everyone 100 grams of broccoli is 50 calories and only 4 grams of carbs, I am eating a lot of extra calories.

Weight is still dropping.

Um ... Bullocks.

An excerpt from my favorite explanation of why this isn't true (from http://www.answerfitness.com/269/negative-calorie-foods-fact-fiction/ ):

Is Celery Really a Negative Calorie Food?
While the list of negative calorie foods has ballooned to include everything from beets to strawberries and mangoes (yes, I’m being serious here), celery is the most commonly cited negative calorie food.

From a nutritional standpoint, celery is pretty much empty. It’s basically made up of water, sodium, some trace minerals and something called cellulose — which is a form of vegetable fiber than the human body cannot digest. It contains no protein or fat and marginal carbohydrates. Any other nutrition in celery is in the form of vitamins, minerals and enzymes, which contain no calories.

In fact, aside from iceberg lettuce and cucumbers, you probably couldn’t find a less nutritious, lower-calorie vegetable to eat. These foods are already about as close as you can get to eating zero calories. Close, but not quite, as we’ll see in a moment.

A large, stalk of celery weighing in at 2.2 ounces contains only nine calories. Negative calorie diet advocates claim that the mere process of chewing and digesting celery requires an expenditure of energy that exceeds the 9 calories present in the celery. Therefore, the argument goes, celery has “negative calories.”

Again, this all sounds good in theory, but what about in practice?

Issues with the Negative Calorie Foods Theory
There are some flaws with the negative calorie food theory, however.

First, the reason that certain foods like celery are already low in calories is exactly because of their high-non-caloric nutritional content. The fact that cellulose, water and minerals like sodium contain no calories is already figured into the food’s caloric-content. That’s why it has minimal calories in the first place. Negative food advocates want to double-dip here, and have you believe that the non-caloric nutrients like cellulose lower its effective calorie levels even more, but that’s just not how it works. This is already baked-in.

Second, the whole argument that the body burns more calories chewing and digesting negative calorie foods like celery is also suspect.

Yes, the body does expend a certain amount of energy to digest food, but that expenditure — even with foods that contain a high-percentage of non-caloric nutrients like cellulose — is actually fairly minimal.

Typically, the body will expend 10 - 15 percent of the calories you consume each day to fuel digestion. Let’s just throw the negative calorie food gurus a bone and say that for foods that are rich in non-digestible nutrients like cellulose, that number is actually as high as 50 percent of calories consumed (I have no evidence for this claim — I’m just being generous to prove a point.)

In the case of celery — the poster child of all negative calorie foods – you would be burning an extra 4.5 calories per each 9 calorie, 2.2 oz serving of celery. That would put your effective net calories at 4.5 (9/50% = 4.5 calories) — hardly “negative calorie” territory.

And because the amount of energy expended on digestion of foods is always expressed as a percentage, to have a negative calorie effect, digestion would have to constitute at least 101% of the energy consumed in order to create a negative calorie environment — something which is physically impossible.

So it appears that the food that is the best candidate for qualifying as a negative calorie food — celery – can’t even hit the break-even point, let alone become “calorie-negative.”

Negative calorie foods?

I don't trust anything "Livestrong".