What they mean is, it’ll be expended not digesting the fibre, ie pushing it down the entire length of the gastro-intestinal canal. This would certainly consume more energy than chewing it.
“This would certainly consume more energy than chewing it”
This site
http://whyfiles.org/103fat2/6.html
Lists chewing Gum at 11 calories per hour.
From Cecils article we learn that we burn 60 ber hour sleeping. This accounts for our heart beating, breathing, brain activity, body temperature regulation and a host of other functions including our digestive processes.
Are you sure the word you want to use is “certainly”?
And here,
http://vegweb.com/articles/monique-1017098288.shtml
We learn that one cup of celery contains
celery contains adequate amounts of potassium, folate and fiber. One cup of diced celery provides 344.4 milligrams of potassium, 34 micrograms of folate, 2 grams of fiber, 19 calories, and less than 0.16 grams of fat
See there? 2 whoppinggrams of fiber. Without a doubt a huge strain on the digestive system. Or not.
Or you can check out what the USDA has to say about "Celery, Raw 1 cup.
http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp/cgi-bin/list_nut_edit.pl
Yep. Chewing one cup of diced celery, to use your example, would take maybe one minute, so from your figures that’s 11/60 or about 0.183 calories. Pushing that 2 grams of fibre through howevermany metres of intestine would certainly use more than that.
well one point, technically you would expend energy ‘digesting’ the fibre, as the smooth muscle in the epithelium of the small and large intestine has to contract to push it all out, which expends energy. Celery is pretty much all lignin and water, so its kind of like eating a diluted piece of wood. celery is rubbish.
I love it. Well, “love” may be too strong a word, but I do like it. Besides, it is a key constituent of mirepoix , which in turn is a key ingredient of all sort of good stuff.
RR
If we accept the definition of a calorie as “The amount of heat required to raise the temperature of one gram of water by one degree Celsius”, then how could drinking ice water not burn calories? A healthy body will attempt to bring the water up to 98.6F, rather than letting the ice water cool the temperature down. The body will burn calories to raise the water temperature.
Best to all,
Plynck
It is an unfortunate fact that in the food world, a “calorie” means a kilocalorie. (I gather that it’s not the food people’s fault, though, that they inherited a “small calorie” and a “large calorie” – aka “calorie” and “Calorie” – from scientists.) So you’d have to drink a liter of ice water to lose 100 food calories by that means.
Whoops! Make that about 30 food calories.
I don’t want to get into the details of the argument here, as it would be a big hijack. Check out this thread on the topic.
But, to summarize, if I recall properly, the basic argument against it is that drinking water doesn’t help you burn calories unless it makes you cold enough that you start to actively shiver, because otherwise the heat that raises the water’s temperature will just be waste heat, which would have been produced anyway – in other words, with a small amount of ice water, you won’t burn more calories to warm the water, you will just shed less heat through your skin.
Just thought I’d drop back in and remind everyone that Cecil does not claim celery to be “negative calorie” in his column. Just that it does not have enough calories to support a very energetic lifestyle. He also points out that it is comparable to broccoli and cabbage in caloric content per gram.
I adressed the fact that Uca Ceese only proved you couldn’t survive on eight celery sticks an hour as your sole source of nutrition. True enough, but it dosn’t show celery to be non-nutritive.
It wasn’t until the “true believers” started posting that I had to resume my quest to debunk the negative calorie aspect of celery consumption.
Ok lets review,
100 grams of celery contains about 17 calories
About the same as two lifesaver candies
Less than two grams of fiber (the 2 gram mes was based on one cup or 120 grams)
95 grams of water
Now for the arguments.
“celery is so fibrous”
Not really, it’s less that 2 percent fiber
Paraphrase,
“pushing 2 grams of fibre will “certainly” use more than .183 calories”
Ok I am going to concede this, though I know you have no cite, I also cannot find any study anywhere that explores how many calories it takes to take a 2 gram dump.
Lets pull a number out of our ass and say 3.
That means our bodies use 3.183 calories to extract 17 calories from celery. A net gain of 13.817 delicious calories.
But what of the 95 grams of water? How many calories does it take to pee that out?
Figure it out yourself, I’m bored of this game.
Thanks, Chorpler.
I wasn’t aware of the previous column. Thanks for the link. My monitor is now permanently scorched, but thanks 
I wasn’t intending to hijack the thread or open old wounds. My only thought was to respond to the concept of ingesting some substance that would reduce calories. It appears that there are two schools of thought here, right or wrong: Either reducing calories through increased digestion, or reducing calories based on homeothermic activity. Oh wait, there are three if you believe the infomercials…
I now leave this thread to the high celeried folks.
Best to all,
plynck
The quantity of energy that you shed through your skin depends on your skin temperature and the rate at which heat leaves it for a given temperatuere gradient. Drinking 1 litre of ice water will certainly not result in your body temperature dropping, so yes, you do heat it up. It’s all part of the body’s temperature regulatory mechanisms. Thermal energy is generated by a lot of other means than shivering. So, drinking a litre of ice water will cost you about 36 calories. If you eat any of the ice, it’ll be a lot more. If you were to eat 1kg of ice slowly enough that it had no effect on your body temperature, you’d lose about 116 Calories.
Did you read the above thread? Perhaps you shoudl take this argument there. I’d certainly be interested to see what comes of it.
Wow, thanks Chorpler, but I think I’ll just take it easy on that one. I see three long pages of engineers trying to guess at how physiology works. If anyone wants some info, that is my job (physiologist, Cambridge University, UK) so just drop an email (reg42ATcam.ac.uk) and I can reply either in kind or by post to a message board.
However, with that long argument, I don’t think I see much evidence of people who are interested in how the body works and what the answer is to the problem. They seem more keen on keeping on shouting their ideas until they become right.
Since you’re a physiologist, ** swyves**, let me ask you a related question, over which I had an argument many years ago with a fellow runner. He maintained that you lose more calories running in hot weather since the body sweats more to maintain thermal equilibrium. My contention was, and still is, that you lose more in cold weather since the body has to produce more heat to maintain thermal equilibrium. Do you have an answer to this?
Let me add that we also had an argument about thin runners versus heavier runners running into the wind. (He was heavier than I.) His contention was that thin runners have an advantage because they have less wind resistance. My contention was that thin runners have a disadvantage because the wind affects them more. Do you have an opinion on this weighty question? (Nothing like a run to solve the world’s problems.)
Sure: as for the weather thing, I’m afraid your friend was right. Just to live in cold weather take more energy than living in hot weather, as your body’s mechanisms to generate heat (thus keeping your body teperature stable) burn calories fast. However, when you’re running you’re using calories so fast that excess heat is being generated. Therefore, the mechanisms to warm you up can slow down, even if it’s quite cold.
On the other hand, sweating (and other mechanisms for shedding excess thermal energy) do consume some energy (albeit much less than the heat-generating mechanisms). If you’re running, you tend to be sweating anyway (or at least I do!). That means, expending calories to cool down. So unless it’s seriously seriously cold, the problem is one of keeping the temperature low despite all the energy being burned up (with less than 100% efficiency) in the muscles.
Therefore, the hotter it is, the bigger that problem is – and hence, the amount of energy you expend. I wouldn’t advocate running in hotter weather as a way of burning extra calories though – the difference is minimal, and you’re putting some serious stress on a lot of systems.
As for the wind question, the lighter runner has to expend proportionally more energy, the bigger one actually more. Really strong winds might change this, if the light runner is actually having trouble keeping on course (we’re talking gales here). Then they might actually have to expend more energy.
While I’m happy to answer all sorts of questions, this is getting a bit away from the topic of the thread. I’m happy to correspond by email or msn messenger (my hotmail is swyves), or to move to a different message board (or maybe a new thread?).
And even if you go though all that it matters less as time goes on since CO2 increases are putting more carbs in the veggies anyway without adding fiber or protein.
damn, now i want some celery and none in the house=(
Well, actually, how about that damned rooster I hate…I would have to chase it around the yard for about 5 minutes before I could corner it, chop its little head off while hanging upside down in a canvas cone looped over a fencepost. Then I would have to go and lug out my propane burner, a large pot and water, and get it to a quick boil, then dunk the dearly departed into it and start plucking. After the damned think is plucked, I would have to clean it, and chop off the feet and wing tips, use needlenose pliers to get out the little stubby protofeathers, and take it in and kosher it. [toss it into heavily salted water. Trust me, kosher storeboght chicken as well, makes a world of difference.] Then I would have to prep carrots, celery, a couple onions, some potatos and herbs, and soak a rommertopf in water. I can do that while I am koshering the bird, and even go outside and dump the water left after firming up the skin to pluck it over the little mound of dirt I backfilled the hole I bled the bird out into and dumped the miscellaneous internal guts I didnt salvage and throw int the freezer. Helps level out the little mound=).
Back in the house, put all the veggies, seasonings, chicken and about half a cup or so of chicken broth out of the freezer into the rommertopf, pop it into an oven and kick on the heat, call it about 2 hours or so…not sure how you would figure the calories. If you wanted to really work off some calories, make it a wood burning oven, and you could add chopping wood, making a fire outside to boil the water before plucking, and making and tending a fire inside for cooking=)
There is a reason that women used to not be fat if they didnt have a servant…
Actually, if people are in the connecticut/massachusets area Sturbridge Village used to do a great all day saturday thing where you do a meal in one of the houses the way they did in 1830, great fun=)