Do negative calories exist? – ifood (Canva photo)
Lose weight by eating negative calorie foods? Let’s find out the whole truth, what they are, if they work and what the experts think.
You have certainly heard of the so-called at least once negative calorie foods a miracle of nature that would allow you to lose weight by eating.
In practice, some foods would have so few calories that eating and digesting them requires more energy than they bring, thus allowing you to lose weight by eating, in fact.
But will it really be like this? Or is it just baseless news? And what do the experts think?
Let’s find out what’s true behind this idea and what are the foods in question.
Negative calorie foods: what are they?
But are there really calorie-free foods? Absolutely no, but certainly some have a really negligible number such as celery which provides 20 per 100 grams, or fennel, which instead provides a few more, about 31. And then among the foods considered to have negative calories we find zucchini, rocket, cucumber, leeks.
And do they lose weight? Do we really consume more calories by eating them than we introduce? According to the nutritionist Nicoletta Bocchinointervened on The Italian kitchen, in reality no food provides zero calories so even those that are labeled as having precisely negative calories actually contain them exactly like all the others. It also points out that “talking only and exclusively of calories in terms of weight loss is now an outdated concept from a scientific point of view”.
Does celery really have negative calories? – ifood (Canva photo)
The truth
The truth according to the doctor is that it is a concept without any foundation developed in the thirties of the last century and that at the moment there is no scientific evidence in this regard. In short, she explains: “The amount of energy the body uses to process ‘negative calorie’ foods is very small. Since these foods are mostly vegetables and greens, therefore composed of carbohydrates and very small percentages of fat and protein, it is really minimal. What we can say about negative calorie foods is that consuming them does not automatically lead to weight loss.
To better explain the concept comes Nourished who talks about it scientifically: “The notions of biochemistry help us to disprove this hypothesis since we know that the so-called diet-induced thermogenesis (TID), the energy required by the body to use and store the nutrients introduced, is only a percentage of the energy assumed with that food: it is higher for foods rich in proteins (25-30%) and lower where carbohydrates (6-8%) and lipids (3-4%) predominate, but in any case it never exceeds the caloric value of the food […] it seems unlikely that the induced energy expenditure can exceed the calories consumed”. False news then, but surely eating vegetables rich in fiber doesn’t hurt.