15 Fired-Up Foods that Burn Away Pounds
By: Brian Good
- Milk, Whole Grain Cereal, Oats
- Jalapenos, Habaneros, Cayennes
- Green Tea, Coffee
- Lean Beef, Pork, Chicken, Turkey
- Salmon, Tuna, Sardines
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Lean Beef, Pork, Chicken, Turkey
Secret Ingredient: Protein
How it works: It takes more energy for your body to digest the protein in meat than it does for it to digest carbohydrates or fat, according to Doug Kalman, R.D., director of nutrition at Miami Research Associates, a nationally recognized pharmaceutical-research facility. "That means that the more protein you eat, the harder your body has to work to digest it, and the more calories you'll burn in the process," he says.
When researchers at Arizona State University compared the benefits of a high-protein diet with those of a high-carbohydrate diet, they found that people who ate a high-protein diet burned more than twice as many calories in the hours following their meal as those eating carbs. Even better, researchers in Denmark found that men who substituted protein for 20 percent of the carbs in their diets were able to boost their metabolisms, increasing the number of calories they burned each day by up to 5 percent.