At least a half of the population is on a diet every day. True, obesity is a serious problem of people nowadays. Thousands of popular websites are full of nutrition tips that will revolutionary change your body weight. Often, when tips become viral, they are taken for granted. No science behind to support it. People in their yearning for weight loss, somehow forget to be skeptical and critical. Fortunately, there are scientists and nutrition specialists who debunk popular diet myths. We have prepared for you 8 most common myths that are scientifically proven to be incorrect.
Not Eating After 7 pm Speeds Up Weight Loss
Somehow it happened that people think are more important when you eat than what and how much. The body weight depends on many factors, such as physical activity, a number of calories entered during the day and so on. Here, the time doesn’t play such an important role. A team from Department of Kinesiology and Nutrition at the University of Illinois conducted a study which proved that time and frequency of eating per day make almost no difference to body weight. Yes, eating during the night could increase the blood sugar, but there are no long-term trials to confirm that eating after 7 pm could reduce weight.
Conclusion: focus on food quality and activity rather than time.
Chewing Gum Speeds Up Weight Loss
No, your brain is not fooled if you chew gum. Several studies were conducted to debunk this myth. Nutritionists at Purdue University have tested 60 volunteers whether the chewing gum affects appetite or no. The results clearly showed there are no effects. An international team of researchers conducted systematic review and meta-analysis of 13 studies to seek insights into the relationship between chewing, appetite, food intake and gut hormones. They noted that studies with positive results were more likely to be published, which increased the popularity of this myth. However, only a few experiments have shown that there are indeed small effects of chewing gum in terms of decreasing self-reported hunger.
Conclusion: previously conducted studies have not found a direct link between weight loss and chewing gum
Celery Has “Negative” Calories
Actually, one cup of chopped celery has 15 calories, but only 10% of its value will be absorbed by our body to digest it. There are no negative calories, but the simple thermic effect of food. The only thing that could be underlined as “negative calories” is drinking the cold water. The water itself has no calories, but our body have to use some energy to heat water before it can be absorbed.
Conclusion: Eating celery means you’re eating food low calorific value, not food without calories at all.
Eating Grapefruit Melts Fat
Department of Primary Care Health Sciences at the University of Oxford researched about the effect of grapefruits on body weights. This study suggests that consumption of grapefruit doesn’t significantly decrease body weight, lipids, or blood pressure as compared with the control condition.
Conclusion: Although grapefruit diet is very popular, there is no effect on weight loss.
Green Tea Speeds Up Metabolism
People have been drinking infusions of tea for thousands of years. One of the most popular is green tea. Although a large number of studies have shown that green tea has many health benefits, losing the body weight is not one of them. Canadian researchers analyzed several studies and found no significant long-term effects of green tea on a body weight. Only on people with metabolic syndrome has some short term effects of drinking tea.
Don’t Eat Before A Work-Out To Burn More Fat
There were a lot of debates on this matter. Eat or not to eat before the exercises were almost as Hamlet dilemma. However, researchers from Northumbria University (UK) conducted an experiment on 12 physically active males to determine whether breakfast and exercise affect metabolism, appetite and macronutrient balance or not. After comparing total energy expenditure and amounts of fat burned up before, during and after exercise, they came to the next results: exercise without breakfast give a 15% greater rate of fat burning during training, but eating breakfast led to a 20% greater total exercise energy expenditure compared to fasting.
Drinking Water Before Meals Makes You Lose More Weight
Somewhat true. This might work only for people with obesity. There was one experiment where they have to drink water 30 minutes before main meals and another group had to visualize their stomach being full 30 minutes before meals. Those who drank the water lost 1.3 kg more than those who did not. As for the people with no obesity, the results are quite variable. Drinking water before meals for some people may have positive, negative or null effects.
Conclusion: Drinking water as a replacement for soft drink or juices indeed affect the daily calorie intake.
Ketogenic Diet Is Better Than Other Diets
The ketogenic diet is known for its very high fat and protein, while cuts carbohydrate. In medicine is used primarily to treat difficult-to-control epilepsy in children, but people often use it for weight loss. However, there were conducted several meta-analyses of the ketogenic diet and found that this diet only for a 900 g causes more weight loss than the low-fat diets.
