I was under the impression that celery, among other foods, are called ‘catabolic’ for their negative calorie effects. Is this just a marketing scheme? Doing a google search for catabolic brings up catabolic.com which claims that it is “The Diet that works three times faster than starvation!” :dubious:
www.m-w.com has catabolic meaning, “destructive metabolism involving the release of energy and resulting in the breakdown of complex materials within the organism.”
Is that fancyspeak for ‘negative calorie’? I was surprised not to see the word mentioned in the column.
AFAIK, a “negative calorie food” is just a food that results in a net “negative” caloric intake when compared to the average amount that you burn, or something like that. There’s no magic involved. It’s just that as a living being, you need to expend energy in maintaining said life, and if you want to lose weight you restrict your input.
I’d never thought I’d say this but Cecil is wrong.
While his data and his experiment were accurate his conclusion was flawed. The heart of it depended on not liking celery much. It took him an entire hour to consume the celery. He then did a little simple math to show that his intake of celery over one hour was insuficient to support his dietary need.
I could come up with the same results using some rich food that would take me a while to eat, say yak nards.
Lets assume that yak nards are eight calories per gram like pure fat. I imagine it would take me no less that 15 days to convince myself to consume 100 of them weighing 12 grams each.
Therefore yak nards will not support human life. Well that is probably true, erm… ok yak nards do not have the caloric content needed to support my life. Cause I wouldn’t eat enough of them.
Now me, I loves me some celery I could eat that paltry little stack Unca Ceece described in a few minutes. So 72 calories in 5 minutes is 504 calorie an hour. easily enough to support my life.
So I guess then the question becomes, since celery has so few calories per unit of mass (or whatever it was), could you consume enough celery to support your daily caloric requirements before your were too full to continue eating?
Or how many calories would it take to dump a load of celery fiber?
No!
No one in their right mind would suggest an all celery diet. The point is celery is not a "negative calorie food. No matter how much you want to believe it.
Well, you haven’t really made that point. When you eat more celery in a given amount of time, doesn’t it take more energy to digest it? Cecil’s time-dependent calculations don’t seem relevant to this part, but it’s really the fundamental question: does it take more energy to digest the celery than you get out of it?
Eight stalks of celery 72 calories, not exactly eating a stick of butter but 72 calories none the less. I estimate I could chow through them in about 5 minutes if I was hungry 10 if I were absentl mindedly snacking. Granted I would chop them into little sticks.
72 calories aught to cover the few minutes in the ten I spent gnaing on the celery and then some. Not fattening but not zero energy gain either.
Lets take it one step farther, say I have an automated celery crusher/ juicer device and all I had to do was drink the juice it evtracted. There goes the thrust of your argument right there.
Or did you mean to imply that beef is a zero calorie food because if I had to slaughter, dress, clean, slice and cook it before I could eat it means it yields less calories than it took to eat?
Sorry bub, but all foods would qualify then, that damn entropy and all.
I think the point of it is that celery is *so fibrous *, that your digestive system expends more energy in processing it than you gain by consuming the few calories the celery contains.
You’re focusing on the time-spent-eating argument, in your rebuttal to what Cecil said, but ignoring the main point. If it takes more energy to digest the celery than the digestive process gets from it, it’s a negative-calorie food. Regardless of the time you spend eating it.
If it takes more energy to digest the celery than the digestive process gets from it
If this were true than I would agree with you but this just doesn’t seem to be the case.
We dont have to eat all the celery to make this observation. Since we both agree that a solid diet of celery would be less than adequate for any lifestyle, just not enough caloric content. This does not make it a negative food. just a (very) low cal one.
Lets try it from a different angle. One of Cecils celery sticks has about eight calories (if I did the math right) right about the same a a cherry lifesaver. Not many, to be sure but present none the less. Eating it will expend some energy, and the digestive process will take some as well, right up to the grand finally of ploping it into the bowl.
The question is does this whole process take more than the magic eight? I doubt it. If this were the case celery would subtract calories from dishes it were added to. Nice thought, but untrue.
Shrinking Violet,
celery is so fibrous
This does not make it anti-caloric (is that even a word?) just a pain in the ass to eat. Celery juice or celery soup would significantly reduce the amount of work it takes to consume, boosting the already tiny amount of usable calories to a little less tiny.
Before you cry foul, and say “we were working with raw 10” sticks of celery", consider taro. This root needs to be dug up, peeled, cooked for 12 hours, then pounded into a paste with water before it is fit to consume. Yet it managed to be the primary staple in the polynesian diet for centuries.
Why is it untrue? If it does take more calories to digest (more than the magic eight per stick, that is) then it does effectively subtract calories from dishes it is added to.
You may doubt that the process of digesting a celery stick takes more than eight calories, but we have Snopes and Cecil, both usually fairly reliable sources, who say that it does. On the other hand, they also have both asserted that drinking ice water will cause you to burn more calories, which has been hotly contested by a number of people as being untrue unless you drink enough water to make yourself start shivering, so just because they assert this doesn’t make it true – that’s one of the things Cecil cites as problematic with Snopes’s answer, in fact.
What we need is an actual number to pin on this, so we could see if it actually does take more than eight calories to digest a celery stick. I think this is what Cecil attempted to do in his column, but as you pointed out, he got caught up in the amount of time it takes to eat the celery rather than the amount of energy it takes to digest it.
I agree. I’ve been thinking pretty hard for a way to determine how much energy it takes to digest celery. Best I could come up with was a little experiment I am not sure I even have the interest to preform.
My dad is a diabetic and has one of those little blood sugar meters. If I go over to his house on an empty stomach, take a glucose level then eat all his celery and re-test a half hour later, will that prove anything?
I expect I would see a slight spike in blood sugar right after consumption proving that there is nutritive value in celery. But how do we determine if this sugar isn’t all used up in passing the bulk through. I suspect not, but I have no idea how to prove it. Any ideas?
You all are forgetting that the body actualy spends energy on digesting the food.
Some foods are harder for the body to digest and are there for actualy calorie “negative”.
Fiber is hard to digest, so it does make sence that a bad tasting, slimy green fiber “bar” made by nature is one of the few calorie negative foods around.
I forgot no such thing. If you would have bothered to actually read the thread you would have known that. Try this, just for the sake of scientific method.
1 Read the post directly above yours
2 Read yours
3Profit!
Let’s leave it at raw celery. The mechanical action of the chewing involved would account for a little bit of energy spent. I still can’t come up with a good way to measure said expenditure, though. I don’t think the blood sugar test will do the trick.
What we need is someone who is all digestive system to down some celery for us in the name of science. Is Homer Simpson available?
RR
Since the celery juice would be raw (uncooked) it should count but since I know what you meant, we need to define how much processing is acceptable before we start “cheating” to prove celery isn’t really a negative calorie food.
You state,
“The mechanical action of the chewing involved would account for a little bit of energy spent”
I disagree, I think it accounts for the lions share of the work done in processing the vegetable. A few people have stated that we will be expending energy digesting the fiber. By definition, fiber is indigestible so we will be expending zero calories on that task.
What remains is the amount of energy it takes the body to absorb the glucose present in the celery juice and how much it takes to pass the bulk.
Our bodies are very efficent at absorbing glucose into the blood stream. This cannot amount to a much of a caloric expenditure.
I don’t know if you have ever taken psillium (Metamucil) but lemme tell ya, celery is bush league compared to this stuff. I’m guessing that in a balanced diet, passing the fibrous bulk of a sane amount of celery is negligible. I eat the stuff by the bunch and have never noticed any thing particulary bulky about the resulting, err… lets call it bowl trout.
So I cant just plop the stuff into my food processor and whiz it into pulp. Can we chop it into say, rice sized particles? How bout 2" long julienne sticks? Or do we have to gnaw it straight off the bunch like Bugs Bunny chawing down a carrot?
It seems we need to go to great lengths to control the method of consumption to arrive at the conclusion that celery is negative net gain when used as a foodstuff. This alone is enough to set my BS detector off.
