Foods
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im pretty sure i know the answer but...


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... i just want to make sure, i like my facts being strait.

i know that digesting celery costs more calories than it is worth. what abouty all the other vegetables? like is broccoli 30 calories per serving after you deduct the amount of clories it takes for your body to digest it, or, is that just what it has prior to digestion? i wanna know if you are burning more calories by eating vegetables than any other non complex carb.

does anyone get one i am asking?

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I'm pretty sure I get what you're asking. If broccoli is 30 calories per serving, that does NOT take into account the calorie cost of chewing it.  However, what I am not sure on is the actual calore burn of chewing raw brocolli, although I assume it is decently high, considering it is a very dense food (vs. say drinking milk).

I think you're asking if the calorie content when you choose a food from the database (or look at a label) takes into consideration how many calories you will expend digesting it.  So I would still log celery if you're eating a bucket of the stuff everyday, if you had a stalk of celery or a leaf of lettuce, the caloric value you really nominal (like 1 cal), so I wouldn't worry about logging it if you don't feel like it. 

The answer is no.  But I wouldn't go logging "digestion" as an activity. Disgestion is taken into account when you caculate your BMR, and really isn't a big percent of the calories your body burns doing it's necessary thing(s).  Plus digesting raw vegetables is going to take more calories than cooked because you need to break it down first, and so on, so it's pretty much impossible to get an exact calorie value for what you burn.  I would expect that complex carbs and dense foods would take more calories to digest and simple sugars would take less....but that's just a guess.  Either way, the calories that you are taking in with complex carbs will go further because fibre and other goodness stays around in your system to make you feel fuller longer than simple sugar.  Hope this helps!

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