The more you eat, the more you fall out? Myths and truths about negative calories

Negative calorie diet

When we sweat and climb the stairs in the winter to lose weight, when we put up with cravings for a week and end up eating chicken, when we drastically cut back on the amount of food we eat and get rid of the hair that falls out, we desperately imagine a comfortable diet.

There are diets that attract attention to such people. It's a negative-calorie diet. Also known as negative calorie foods in the original language, these foods are said to have a miraculous effect on losing weight the more you eat them. How is this possible?

The Scientific Basis for Negative Calorie Foods

Negative calories theorize that if the calories burned to digest food are higher than the calories of the food itself, you will lose weight. For example, if you used 4 calories to digest a 6 calorie meal, the logic is that you can lose 2 calories without exercising. With such an amazing idea, negative calories have been introduced extensively in numerous domestic and international media and have entered the trend. But is there any credible scientific basis for negative calories?

Researchers from Coventry University and the University of Warwick have tested whether celery is really a low-calorie food. Participants in the experiment consumed a celery smoothie with the same caloric content as 326 grams of raw celery, which has a caloric content of 53 kcal. When the participants were examined for 12 hours, they burned 72 calories when they ate raw celery and 112 calories when they ate a celery smoothie. In other words, raw celery had a negative calorie effect of 19 kcal, and celery smoothie had a negative calorie effect of 59 kcal.

However, in this study, it was not clear whether the calories measured by the participants were used to digest celery alone, basal metabolic rates such as respiration and pulse, or other foods. The fact that the media that introduced the experiment was the British Daily Mail newspaper, which published a gossip article that said that putting onions in the ears lowers fever and that eating the black peel of bananas increases immunity, also undermines the credibility of the experiment.

Negative calorie foods have no scientific basis yet. Of course, in the case of protein, there is a special force, which consumes 10-20% of the calories in food for metabolism. This is why when you eat meat, your body temperature rises after 30 minutes. However, even in this case, 80-90% of the calories end up in the body. No calorie food takes more calories from the body than it does on its own.

The Truth About Negative Calorie Foods

The negative calorie craze stems from commercially hyped marketing. A prime example is the Coca-Cola Company's calorie-burning drink Enviga. In 2006, <The Guardian> published an article about the Coca-Cola Company's launch of Enviga, a low-calorie drink. Enviga is a carbonated green tea that helps you lose weight by boosting your metabolism through catechins. The Coca-Cola Company claims that drinking 3 12oz (355ml) Enviga can burn 50~100 kcal, and described this drink as "the first step to a healthy lifestyle."

However, doctors have suggested that if you drink more than three glasses of Enviga a day, as promoted by Coca-Cola, the caffeine may cause your metabolism to reach dangerous levels. In 2007, after the launch of Envy, the American Center for Public Interest and Nutrition Citizen Group sued Coca-Cola and Nestlé. For exaggerating the calorie burning effect of Enviga.

Vegetables like celery also don't become negative calories. Nutritionist Bridget McKeevis wrote in <The Guardian> that "celery is a low-calorie food, but as anyone who has ever run a treadmill knows, it takes a lot of effort to burn even a small number of calories." Time magazine once said that negative calories have so little effect that losing weight by eating celery is like sitting and watching grass grow.

The only food that can burn calories without harming your health is cold water. Water consumes 0.0001 kcal of heat per gram to increase the temperature by 1 degree. For example, if you drink 1 liter (1,000 cc) of ice water at 0 degrees Celsius at a temperature of 36 degrees Celsius, you will burn 36 calories. However, this is a very small number, which is only a spoonful of rice.

In conclusion, it should be noted that negative calorie foods have no scientific basis. In addition, if you only eat foods that are negative in calories, you may end up with nutrient deficiencies due to only certain nutrients, and you may gain more weight as a reward for your diet. Dieting, after all, is a battle with yourself. Don't be fooled by the sweet words of easy dieting.