Subject: Negative Calories

From: [email-masked] (Ron Herff)
Date: 28 May 1995 19:58:42 GMT

I heard that some food require more calories to digest than the food 
provides. This means that, in effect, these type of food have "negative" 
calories. Does anyone have any information on this subject. Thank in advance.

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From: [email-masked] (Dr. Stephen Dubin)
Date: 28 May 1995 18:56:01 -0400

I recall that when I took physics II, I learned about the heat of fusion.
According to that concept, water (in the form of ice) requires 80 calories
per gm to make the transition from frozen to liquid state.  I knew that
a pound of ugly fat is worth about 3500 calories ; so, by simple division,
I determined that I would need to melt 43.8 gm of ice to lose a pound of
excess body fat.  This seemed much easier than diet or exercise so I 
weighed three ice cubes (50 gm) and prepared to tuck them into convenient
body orifices for melting.  To my chagrin, I learned that food energy is
measured in *LARGE* calories (1 large calorie = 1000 small calories),
while the physics II calories are small calories.  Faced with the task
of melting 48 kg of ice with my body warmth, I abondoned the idea.

-- 
|            Stephen Dubin VMD, PhD            |                      |
|  Biomedical Engineering & Science Institute  | Phone: 215-895-2219  |
|  Drexel University,  Philadelphia  PA 19104  | Fax:   215-895-4983  |
|     email: [email-masked]       |                      |

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From: [email-masked] (Rich3rd)
Date: Tue, 30 May 1995 02:23:35 -0600

> calories. Does anyone have any information on this subject. Thank in advance.

There are some foods, such as pickles or celery, which have a very low
Kcal count.  Your average stalk of celery has 3-5 Kcal, which you could
conceivably burn off by the mere act of chewing that celery.  On the other
hand, you burn one or two Kcal per minute just sitting on your butt doing
nothing.  Metabolism of eating (the whole process, from chewing to
elimination of waste) makes up about 10% of your total caloric
expenditure.  You would probably have to eat a truckload of celery a day
to even make a dent in this figure.  But if we could just figure out how
to make a good-tasting chocolate cake out of nothing but celery and
pickles, we'd have it made...

- Rich3rd