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Negative Calorie Foods: Fact or Fiction?

Are Negative Calorie Foods for Real or Just A Bunch of Diet Hot Air? The Fitness Nerd Separates Fact from the Fiction Around Negative Calorie Diets.

Negative Calorie FoodsDear Fitness Nerd,

Whats your opinion on negative calorie foods? Ive read that certain foods like celery require more energy to digest than they provide in calories. Is this true? And if it is, do you have a list of negative calorie foods? Thanks! (Aimee B Dallas, TX)

Negative calorie foods are one of those dieting concepts that sound so good that you want to believe its true.

Just the term negative calorie foods conjures up images of eating all you want, and still losing weight. Its a very powerful promise and one that fad diet and weight-loss pill marketers rely on on every day to sell you their latest pill, potion or weight-loss-secret-revealed eBook.

Take a look under the hood though, and youll find that the concept of negative calorie foods has more in common with a good urban legend than with solid nutrition advice. And like an urban legend, negative calorie foods do have a grain of truth at their center, but thats about it.

What Is A Negative Calorie?

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the concept of negative calories and negative calorie foods, heres the short version:

The theory is that a negative calorie food is any food that requires more energy to digest than the energy (calories) actually contained in the food. The idea here is that by eating these foods, you can burn more calories than you consume and lose weight more rapidly and efficiently.

Origins of the Negative Calorie

The concept of negative calorie foods has been around for almost a decade, and has been popularized via two main sources: Internet discussion boards and the 1999 book, Foods that Cause You to Lose Weight: the Negative Calorie Effect, by Neal D. Barnard, M.D.

Barnard is the founder of Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), which is a vegetarianism advocacy group with close ties to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA.) Critics of Barnard and his book will point out that Foods that Cause You To Lose Weight: the Negative Calorie Effectis less about negative calorie foods, as it a paean to a ultra-low fat, vegetarian/vegan diet. This in itself isnt bad, except that Barnard cloaks his crusade for vegetarianism in a cloud of quasi-scientific mumbo-jumbo that leads people to believe that vegetables have some magic negative calorie effect in the body.

Barnards diet plan is actually fairly extreme and has you cutting out all dairy, meat, nuts, fish and even healthy fats like olive oil. While including plenty of fruits, vegetables and whole grains in your diet is clearly a fantastic goal, Barnards advice to avoid even healthy fats flies in the face of most current research around the broad health and fat-loss benefits of things like MUFAs and Omega-3 fatty acids present in sources like fish oil. In this regard, Bernard seems woefully behind the times.

Even more interesting is that outside of the books title, the term negative calories is rarely mentioned by Barnard. Its hard not to conclude that its inclusion in the title was done purely for marketing sizzle, since calling the book Vegetables That Cause You To Lose Weight is a bit of a yawner. Still, Barnard gets credit for coining the term negative calorie, even if what he really wants you to do is just eat more vegetables.

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, Im being serious here), celery is the most commonly cited negative calorie food.

From a nutritional standpoint, celery is pretty much empty. Its 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 couldnt 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 well 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 isalready figured into the foods caloric-content. Thats 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 thats 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. Lets 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 Im 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  cant even hit the break-even point, let alone become calorie-negative.

The Negative Calorie List Grows  Damn The Science!

One of the most fascinating twists to the whole negative calorie myth is how the list of negative calorie foods has been expanded to include all kinds of fruits, vegetables and greens (regardless of their actual calorie content), including:

  • Asparagus
  • Beet Root
  • Broccoli
  • Cabbage
  • Carrot
  • Cauliflower
  • Celery
  • Chicory
  • Hot Chili
  • Cucumber
  • Garden cress
  • Garlic
  • Green Beans
  • Lettuce
  • Onion
  • Radish
  • Spinach
  • Turnip
  • Zucchini
  • Apple
  • Blueberries
  • Cantaloupe
  • Cranberry
  • Grapefruit
  • Honeydew
  • Lemon/Lime
  • Mango
  • Orange
  • Papaya
  • Peach
  • Pineapple
  • Raspberry
  • Strawberry
  • Tomato
  • Tangerine
  • Turnip
  • Watermelon

Its unclear why these particular foods consistently seem to appear on every Internet list of negative calorie foods.

Aside from their relatively high water or cellulose content, there seems to be very little rhyme or reason as to which food makes the list. Its almost as if someone randomly picked a bunch of vegetables and fruits, published them on their website as negative calorie foods (or maybe they culled them from Dr. Barnards book) and the rest of the Web has just perpetuated that myth ever since.

Fruits? Negative Calories? Huh?

The inclusion of fruits in the list of negative calorie foods is particularly perplexing.

While fruit does typically contain a large amount of water and has some indigestible fiber, its also very high in fruit sugars (fructose.) To suggest that you will burn more calories digesting fructose than the calories present in the fructose itself is simply pseudo-scientific bunk.

Take watermelon, for example one of the foods typically included on lists of negative calorie foods.

A 9 oz serving of watermelon has 84 calories, 1 gram of fiber, 21 grams of carbohydrates and 17.4 grams of sugar (indeed, the bulk of carbohydrates in watermelon come from sugar.) While calories are certainly low compared to a Dove Bar, any suggestion that your body will burn in excess of 84 calories simply by digesting a few slices of watermelon defies not only bio-chemistry, but also the Laws of Thermodynamics.  The only way youre going to burn that watermelon off is if you run a couple laps around the gym.

Negative Calorie Diet: The Secret is in the Enzymes?

So how does this stuff get perpetuated and how do negative calorie prophets get around the Laws of Thermodynamics?

Adherents of the negative calorie diet myth will throw around a bunch of bio-chemical hooha to justify why these foods create negative calorie environments in the body. One of the most frequently cited reasons for why these foods create a negative calorie effect is because of enzymes.

Which enzymes were talking about are never mentioned. This is probably because the authors themselves have no idea they just read it once in one of the hundreds of nearly identical Internet articles on negative calorie foods.

Heres one of my favorite explanations of how these un-named enzymes work, taken directly, word-for-word from a diet website that claims to understand how negative calorie foods function. The name and address of that site shall remain nameless lest the owner and author of this nonsense be labeled a quack:

All foods have a nutrient (carbohydrate, fat, protein), caloric (calories) and vitamin & mineral content. Vitamins stimulate living tissues to produce enzymes that breakdown the caloric nutrients of that food.

The foods with negative calorie contain sufficient vitamins & minerals that produce enzymes in quantities sufficient to break down not only its own calories, but additional calories present in digestion as well. This is called negative calorie effect.

Huh?

If youre scratching your head, youre not alone. I have no idea what this person is talking about and I suspect that if you asked a PhD in bio-chemistry or nutrition, theyd have an equally-perplexed look on their face. Yes, enzymes do help break down food, and yes there are enzymes in vegetables and fruits which can help with digestion, but to suggest that these enzymes create a negative calorie effect is pure speculation.

The great thing is that this exact excerpt with some minor modifications here and there basically appears verbatim within just about every article written online about negative calorie foods. Clearly the copy and paste function is popular among negative calorie fans.

The scientific citations to back up this alleged enzyme action in negative calorie foods are pretty thin. They typically cite two references: one from Dr. Dean Ornish that showed a vegetarian diet helped people with heart disease cut their weight by an average of 20 lbs without limiting calories and without exercise; and a reference to a 1994 article in Self Magazine by Dr. Barnard that discusses negative calorie foods.

The exact study by Ornish is not cited, so I was unable to confirm or review the Ornish study to see exactly what it had to say about negative calories. On the surface, it seems like negative calorie advocates are simply associating research about the positive weight loss effects of diets high in vegetables and low in dietary fat with the concept of negative calories even though the research itself may say nothing about the negative calorie effect.

In other words, beware of diet book authors bearing flimsy research.

The Lowdown on The Negative Calorie Myth: Veggies ARE Good For You

At the end of the day, the Negative Calorie Diet just seems to be a lot of wishful thinking that just keeps getting regurgitated online ad nauseum with no real scientific proof that any of these foods create negative calorie environments in the body. Like a bad joke that wont die, the negative calorie myth just keeps getting passed around, and around, and around.

Yes, a diet high in whole food sources of fruits and vegetables will help people lose weight and can have all kinds of health benefits that make them a smart choice and a centerpiece of a clean eating approach to dietand nutrition. But in terms of putting you into the negative calorie zone, dont hold your breath.

Many of the fruits and vegetables that make the negative calorie food list are quite low in calories and very high in beneficial antioxidants, vitamins, minerals and phytochemicals which may prevent heart disease and cancer. They also are very filling, and because of their low calories, allow you to eat a higher volume of healthy food, which if substituted for higher-calorie junk food will help you lose weight and body fat.

So while the whole negative food myth seems to be exactly that a myth there certainly is no harm in loading up on these fruits and vegetables as part of a healthy diet. Just dont expect fistfuls of celery to be the key to lasting weight loss.

By the way, if youre interested in a little more negative calorie fun, be sure to check out this recipe for Negative Calorie Chocolate Cake courtesy of Steamy Kitchen.com.

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Comments (24)

  1. anakronism (1 comments) says:

    Wow, this is the first truly common sense and scientific article on this subject that Ive found. The negative calorie theory always seemed too good to be true to me. Now I know why. Even snopes.com was fooled on this one! Thanks very much for the information.

    reply
  2. Matt (194 comments) says:

    Anakronism, thanks for dropping by and leaving a comment on the Negative Calorie diet and food myth. Youre right Snopes did get this one wrong, since they suggest that there is a calorie-deficit created when you eat lower-calorie foods like celery. Thats just not how energy balance works in the body.

    When you really dig into it and do the research and math, the claim that any food outside of plain water has “negative calorie” is silly. But then again, a lot of diet advice is based on conjecture and the false idea that “correlation equals causation.”

    Again, appreciate the comments and hope youll stop by again.

    reply
  3. Someguy (1 comments) says:

    I will stick to negative calorie drinks like really cold water and also ice water and ice
    and I get all the vitamins Ill ever need
    by taking a multi vitamin

    Ive only consumed water, multi-vitamins, and protein supplements for 3 years now and Im buff as fuck.  you can see my back muscles when you look at my stomach and if i turn sideways,  I can slip into credit card size slots.

    reply
  4. david (7 comments) says:

    Hello,

    I have a problem with your math. You said that it takes 15% of caloric intake to digest food. I think there is a flaw in your thinking here. I find it impossible for the amount of calories burned by digesting food to be a percentage of the total calories taken (it cannot be a percentage). Let me explain my point with 2 examples. If  I eat a banana with 100 calories, based on your 15% assumption i would burn 15 calories to burn the banana. But what if I eat a cheese cake that contains 2000 calories? Would I burn 300 calories just by digesting it? that seems hard to believe. 300 calories is equal to hiking for 30 minutes, It doesnt take that much energy to digest a cheesecake. So my point is that the amount of calories needed to burn a food item cannot depend on the food items caloric content. Here is my other example, what if I eat sand all day? Sand doesnt have any calories, and eating it definitely will consume some calories in the process of digesting it. Of course sand is not food, but what if we found a food that had so little nutritional value (take pure fiber for example, corn bran) that if you ate it all day, it would actually cause your body to burn energy to digest it? Thanks,

    reply
  5. david (7 comments) says:

    Ahh, I didnt mean to say burn the banana, I meant digest the banana. Although burning a banana would be funny.

    reply
  6. Batman (1 comments) says:

    Your claim is based on the calorie consumption of digestion being based solely on and scaling to the calorie intake.

    Im not sure that this is true. The process of digestion seems like it would have at least some base amount of calorie-burning that is not based only on what is eaten.

    Based on your example with the inflated 50%, if the number of calories burned was based on caloric intake, a 1000-calorie chocolate cake would require 500 calories to burn, or 100-150 based on what you call a typical situation.

    I just dont buy that the calories expended in digestion scale directly with caloric intake. I think that maybe you took a 10-15% figure based on a regular diet and applied that inappropriately to this situation.

    On what is that figure based?

    reply
  7. C-jay (1 comments) says:

    will the negative calories still work if theyve been steamed/boiled???

    reply
  8. Ben (1 comments) says:

    Ok ive been lookin everywhere n everyone contradicts each other I wanna loose weight I eat fruit yogurt n steak n chicken green tea etc so I think I eat ok ne comments to help me? Wanna loose 40 pds email me id appreciate it

    reply
  9. Niall Barr (1 comments) says:

    This is an appalling example of poor reasoning and innumeracy dressed up as  science.

    reply
  10. Jay (4 comments) says:

    Thx for the article.  I heard about negative calories and wondered if its a myth.  The moment I saw the name Barnard in your article I knew something fishy was going on.  Like the old saying goes, If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

    reply
  11. MattG (1 comments) says:

    I think your analysis is wrong when you claim that it is impossible for celery to be negative calorie.

    You say 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. This statement is not correct, that energy expended in digestion is a percentage does not imply that it cannot exceed 100%. Take a non-realistic case of eating something ridiculous, like sand. Clearly there would be a small number of calories consumed by a body just by the muscle exertions of pushing it through the digestive tract, if nothing else, but no dietary calories would be imparted on the body. Cellulose is not so different from sand in this respect, some small energy will be consumed pushing it through the digestive tract, and a small amount of energy will be gained by the body from the few nutrients in celery. It is distinctly possible that the energy spent in digestion will exceed the energy gained from celery.

    However I think something we can both agree on is that even if celery is a negative calorie food, the number of calories involved is so small that the effect is negligible, since a minute of exercise would probably dwarf the negative calories.

    reply
  12. Johnny’s – How To Get Abs (1 comments) says:

    Wow great content bud. So good to see someone doing research into these myths that seem to propel themselves around the internet without any idea where they have came from

    reply
  13. darlean (1 comments) says:

    You are only person who I have found to have written about this topic who supports his blog with facts and actual references.  Even that Dr. Nancy lady from Time Life online listed no proof or references to her article.

    Thanks!

    reply
  14. John (14 comments) says:

    Wow, sounds good, but if you do read up on what a PHD has to say on the subject that has done actual studies the negative calorie thing is NOT a myth. I wont go into details or the fact I have friends who have used the diet with great success, one of which a doctor and successful triathlete considering all you actually propose is speculation and doubt. Guess the name says it all though, fitness nerd, an enthusiast, but not an expert.

    reply
  15. 123123 (1 comments) says:

    but what about the chewing action/ you calculation fail to involve the act of chewing. chewing is a part is the way the body digests food so that should be included.

    reply
  16. J (1 comments) says:

    I agree that the idea of negative calories is likely bunk, but your reasoning here is simply wrong. It is obviously true that digestion would have to expend more than 100% of the calories contained in the food to create a negative calorie situation. However, this is possible, due to the difference between real (physical) calories and dietary calories.
    A calorie is a measure of energy used in physics. When we say calorie in terms of nutrition, we actually dont mean calorie in the way that a scientist does; we refer only to those calories that are absorbed by the human body as a result of digestion. There is more energy (i.e. real calories as physics uses the term) in food than what we say when use calories in the dietary sense. The easiest example to demonstrate this is water. When we say water has zero calories we mean that it has no dietary calories—that is, no calories that our body absorbs as a result of digestion. We do not mean that it literally has zero physical calories in the scientific sense. That would mean that water contained no energy at all, and that the electrons in the hydrogen and oxygen atoms wouldnt be moving at all. That is obviously not something that is true about water.
    So, it is possible (at least theoretically) for negative calorie foods to exist. You just need a food that is complex enough for the digestion process to expend energy digesting it, but whose calories are not of the type that the human body absorbs. That is, the body is expending energy to break down the structures in the food, but the results of that digestion are not actually absorbed by the body.
    Whether the body actually uses more energy (i.e. burns more calories) to break down the cellulose in celery than it ultimately absorbs and stores in the body, I dont know. If it does, its likely to be a trivial amount, and certainly not something anyone can bank on as a weight loss tool. However, its important to understand the difference between physical calories and dietary calories or you can be lead to all sorts of strange and erroneous conclusions about nutrition and the human body.

    reply
  17. Ty (1 comments) says:

    Well, there was no proof to back your claim. The entire basis of your argument is that, celery for example, cannot burn more calories while being digested than the number of calories that it contains (only 10-15% of total is burned while metabolizing). Well, according to what metabolic process? Have you cited a study? Your conclusion is practically a re-statement of your own subjective hypothesis that it is impossible for a food to have negative calories.

    I am not an advocate for negative calorie foods, nor do advocate that all foods are positive calorie foods. However, I did want to find a good article that contain some substantive material including studies and scientific reasoning; however, the reasoning is highly subjective and throws out random numbers that do not have an explanation behind them.

    Please do some research and use recent studies from credible institutions such as universities and national/international scientific research associations, before making claims.

    reply
  18. David (7 comments) says:

    10-15% of the calories burnt for any individual item we eat, you say? So my stomach could churn its way through an elephantine 30 pounds of celery bulk (2000 calories) expending only 250 calories in the process? Holy horse manure, batman! Or alternatively, gulping down a quick cup of olive oil (2000 calories) would still put me out an exorbitant 250 calories roiling away at that stubborn, profoundly indigestible oil? Science is like totally amaze-balls! Personally Id prefer the impossibly efficient celery deforestation. /sarcasm Learn2Logic, then pass the celery.

    reply
  19. Stuart (1 comments) says:

    Sorry to debunk your theory buit there are a lot of negative calorie foods, it depends on how youprepare them.

    Water has no calories, however if you drink water you burn calories, therefore water is a negative calorie food.

    Proof – Cold water from your refridgerator (5 degrees) your urine (32 degrees) to raise the temperature of 1 liter of water by 1 degree takes 1 calorie. Therefore if you drink 1 liter of water from the refridgerator you will burn 27 calories in raising its temperature as such water is a negative calorie food.

    reply

 

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