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More Insights Into Negative Calorie Foods

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In the first part of this, we explored primarily vegetables that take more calories to digest than the item contains. This part focuses on fruit. They weren’t lying when they said that people should eat more fruit and vegetables in their diets, even if a person prefers to eat a lot of meat. Many of the fruits in this list can be used to enhance the flavor of meat, in fact.

One thing that you might notice is that all of these fruits are high in water content, most are high in fiber, and most contain antioxidants. This is a commonality among fruits that are negative calorie. It also helps when the fruits are kinds that most people enjoy. Which do you especially like?

#1 Cucumbers

Cucumbers are largely water and have a glycemic load index of 1. One-half cup of cucumber slices have less than 8 calories, so it isn't surprising that this is a negative calorie food. It is also a tasty one. Cucumber sandwich, anyone?

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    • Cucumbers are interesting in another way, too. They actually lower body temperature a little, so eating some on a hot day can help relieve the heat and it isn’t a person’s imagination that does it.

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  3. since I started with my health ins plain & have been going to the docs
    & seen what I weighed at the start I was stunned cause I never thought
    I could get over weight like I was, NOW I have stopped eating most the
    “YUMMY” foods & went on a strict diet of nothing BUT fruits & veggies
    & eat one meal a day the rest of the day I eat my fruits & veggies & have
    my 1 meal at night which is something like a bowl of grits or oatmeal or rice
    something that will just kill the hunger.

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    • For a very long time, I’ve advocated a balanced diet plan. It helps people get to their ideal weight and stay there. The balanced diet is 40% of the daily calories from carbohydrates, 30% from fats, and 30% from protein. Most people, particularly in the US, eat double the amount of carbs that they should have and half the amount of protein. The most common result is weight gain and a feeling of not being totally well, a lack of energy, memory issues, sleep issues, heart, stomach, and kidney problems, and so on.

      What surprises many people is that of dietary choices, vegans and vegetarians are more likely to be overweight than any other group. According to the CDC, over 70% of vegetarians are overweight. A big reason is that a lot of foods that vegetarians can eat are very high in carbs and low in protein. This is especially true for most grains; wheat, oats, barley, rye, rice, and corn.

#2 Cranberries

Cranberries may indeed have 50 calories per cup, but they are actually negative calorie fruits. These are commonly made into cranberry sauce late in the year, in which case the calories do add up because sugar is usually added since cranberries are tart. Still, cranberry juice is especially healthy, particularly for kidney health. Cranberries are also high in vitamin C and manganese. The GLI for cranberries is 2. Incidentally, it is easy to make a healthier alternative to store-bought cranberry sauce.

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#3 Apples

It might surprise people, considering how sweet many apples are, that apples are on the list of negative calorie foods. However, apples contain a lot of dietary fiber, which means that the digestive system needs to burn more calories in order to digest them. Apples are also a good source of vitamin C and potassium.

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#4 Watermelon

It should come as no surprise that watermelon is a negative calorie food. It has a very large water content. Watermelon also contains a good amount of vitamins A and C, plus several antioxidants. And yes, it is true; watermelons are technically berries. Incidentally, it makes no difference if the watermelons are seeded or seedless, they are still good for you. The GLI for watermelon is 3.

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#5 Blueberries

Blueberries are well-known for being healthy. They contain powerful antioxidants as well as vitamin C and manganese. They are also negative calorie as if you needed more reasons to eat them. Incidentally, vitamin C is an antioxidant, too.

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    • I do too, or with sugar and cream. I also love picking wild blueberries and huckleberries, but admit that most of the berries I pick never make it to the pail. Incidentally, what is true of blueberries is also true of huckleberries, though they aren’t the same thing.

      They also taste great in pancakes or waffles.

        • Huckleberries tend to be smaller but sweeter. Growing up at Crater Lake, there were huckleberries in abundance. Every fall, we could pick as many as we wanted, though we had to watch out for bears.

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          • There are a number of berries they could be if they produced ‘small berries’. For instance, currants and bearberries and elderberries are all small berries, though the bushes, leaves, and so forth are all substantially different. Although we’ve grown blueberries at two of the last four places we’ve lived, they aren’t especially common in gardens because they require highly acidic soil. Most garden soil is slightly alkaline.

#6 Oranges

An orange is a negative calorie food that is well known for being very high in vitamin C. A cupful of the segments contains 160% of the daily requirement for vitamin C. What many people don't know is that oranges are also high in dietary fiber, folate, niacin, calcium, and potassium.

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    • Oranges are one of my wife’s favorite fruits. When I was a kid, one of the things we could always expect to get in our stockings at Christmas was a nice, big navel orange.

#7 Strawberries

Strawberries are not only a negative calorie food, they are also quite high in vitamin C; nearly as much so as oranges. A cup of strawberries provides just under 150% of the daily requirement for vitamin C. They are also high in manganese and dietary fiber.

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    • One of my favorite pies is strawberry-rhubarb, but our strawberry plants usually produce so well that we also have many bowls of strawberries, sugar, and cream. Of course, neither the pie nor the strawberries, sugar, and cream are negative calorie, but the strawberries definitely are. :))

    • This is one that I grow quite a few of, though we only have one row of strawberries planted. That row is about 50 feet long and three feet wide, and it gets bigger each year from the previous year’s runners.

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        • We started with an eight-foot row five years ago. The first two years, we intentionally planted the runners so they were spaced out. The strawberry plants did the rest. I don’t need to mention that strawberries seem to grow well here in Montana. :))

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#8 Cantaloupe

Cantaloupe is negative calorie and it is high in vitamin A, vitamin C, and potassium. Cantaloupe also contains dietary fiber, antioxidants, and lots of water.

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    • We usually get cantaloupe a few times a year and sometimes have a fruit bowl with cantaloupe and seedless watermelon. Occasionally, we also add honeydew melon.

#9 Raspberries

Besides being delicious, raspberries are another negative calorie food that is high in both vitamin C and manganese. They are also surprisingly high in dietary fiber. A cup of raspberries supplies about a third of the daily requirement for fiber.

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#10 Pineapple

Pineapple is negative calorie, very high in vitamin C, very high in manganese, high in copper, high in dietary fiber, high in antioxidants, and raw pineapple contains substances that ease joint pain and swelling. This means that it isn't just delicious and healthy, it is great for diabetics, people on diets, and people suffering from arthritis. If that isn't enough, pineapple is also high in Omega-3 fatty acids and vitamin B6.

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    • I totally love fresh pineapple, though it is expensive, once I learned how to properly peel them. There is a youtube video of a person peeling and coring a pineapple in less than a minute!

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dietfruithealthlow calorienegative calorie

Written by Rex Trulove

7 Comments

    • Apples have considerable carbs, primarily from the fructose, but they are also high in fiber, primarily from the pectin. It may sound strange, but if you want to avoid most of the carbs in apples while using them for the fiber, eat just the apple peels. :))

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    • The key with pineapple is that the substance is destroyed with the application of heat, so it must be raw pineapple and not canned or bottled. If you want to research the substance, by the way, it is called bromelain. It is really a remarkable substance.

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