Negative-calorie foods( FactFriday #8)

A negative-calorie food is a food that requires more energy to be digested than it provides. While this concept is popular in dieting guides, there is no scientific evidence to support that any of the foods claimed as negative-calorie foods are such. Personally I think is more a placebo effect but as long as it tastes good and it feels me up with natural whole substances, I don't think what scientific studies show is relevant.

As a negative-calorie beverage, ice water has no calories but requires the body to expend a very small amount of energy to raise the liquid to body temperature. So it will help boost your metabolism. Same goes with hot water with lemon.

Foods that are negative in calories are mostly low-calorie fruits and vegetables such as:

•  celery

•  grapefruit

•  lemon

•  lime

•  apple

•  lettuce

•  broccoli

• cabbage

There are other negative-calorie foods out there here is a small well with some more alternatives:

The idea of negative calorie foods works for a few reasons:

1. They are high in fiber. This makes it much easier for your body to digest quickly, making it harder for the food to stick around and become fat.
2. All of these foods are either fruits or vegetables. These foods have hardly any fat in them which make them easy to digest, as I said earlier.
3. Most all of these foods will have a high water content. This makes sense since no matter how strong a metabolic effect a food has, the higher in calories it is the harder it will be to burn all of them off. Water has no calories, so fruits and veggies that are particularly high in water will have less calories and thus there is less to burn off while digesting.

But, these foods should not be abused. And yes, they are healthy but we cannot live just off of them. We need all the food groups in our diet in order to have a high metabolism and live healthy lives. Diets based on negative-calorie food do not work as advertised, but can lead to weight loss because they satisfy hunger by filling the stomach with food that has a lower calorie count per volume. 

The bad thing about following a negative-calorie diet is that as soon as you stop eating them, BAM! all of the weight comes rushing back. These is the reason why people need to have healthy BALANCED diets. A variety of fruits, veggies, meat, dairy, starch and snacks. We need them all.