BANGALORE: For some time now, the focus on dieting has been on negative calorie foods. Diet and weight-watchers books boast about how you can consume some foods that are so low in calories that you burn it up as you eat them.

Essentially, the calorific value of these foods is so low that the effort made in chewing and digesting them takes up more calories than what is present in the food.

There are about 20 vegetables and eight fruits that make it to lists of negative calorie foods.

Cabbage, celery and asparagus lead the list of negative calorie vegetables, while orange, apple and cranberries top the fruit list. In the case of cabbage, one chopped cup of the vegetable has only 21 calories, and a stalk of celery contains only around 10 calories. Chewing most foods typically only burns about five calories an hour, but digestion may require slightly more.

Jyothi Prasad, nutritionist at Manipal Hospital, says that no food is truly "negative calorie." "If a person wants to lose weight by eating negative calorie foods, they will have to be eating truckloads of them every day. It is just not practical to do so."

"People cannot have a bowl of these fruits and vegetables with a slice of pizza and hope to lose weight. It is not going to happen," she said.

Ms. Prasad says that she suggests to most of her patients to follow a diet with plenty of fruits and vegetables. "The fibre in these fruits and vegetables will slow down the digestion process and prevent the person from eating large portions of fatty foods."

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail