I’ve heard about this thing so many times. How is it possible to eat something, but still burn calories?
In: Biology
Ingesting things requires energy. Your jaw burns energy to chew, your saliva glands burn energy to produce saliva, your throat burns energy to swallow, your stomach burns energy to secrete acid and enzymes, etc.
If you ingest something completely devoid of useful energy (say, water, or pure cellulose), you’ll expend calories ingesting it and therefore will be at ‘negative calories’… but it really doesn’t take much energy to swallow things.
There’s no food that contains useful energy that requires more calories to process than you get out of it, though. Digestion is very efficient. You may have heard celery has “negative calories”, but that’s a myth. Pretty much the only thing you’re likely to regularly ingest that expends calories is cold water, because your body has to warm it up to body temperature after you drink it. But you’ll suffer water intoxication well before you expend any serious amount of energy doing that.
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