The Answer About Proteins

I was talking with a client today and she had a great question. What is TEF?

She was reading a blog over the holidays and the author was talking about TEF.

Well, let get a few things clear.... we live in a society full of acronyms. Which in this case is a P.I.A. since I didn't know that dog grooming blogs were getting into fitness subjects - who knew! OMG I still think that is bunch of BS! Sorry, got carried away.

So lets look at TEF.... it stands for the Thermic Effect of Food.

This is simply the calories your body burns in the process of digesting what you eat. Depending on what research you are reading up to 20% of what you burn on a daily basis is made up from TEF. This number can be larger or smaller based on the specific foods you eat!

The TEF for Fat is a measly 3% (so a high fat diet will lower you overall caloric burn from TEF)

The TEF for Carbohydrates is 7% (a little better)

The TEF for Protein is 25 - 30% (now we are talking)

How does this work? If you eat 100 calories of fat, you only burn 3 calories to send those calories to you hips. If you eat 100 calories of carbohydrates you only burn 7 calories to process these calories, but if you ate a 350 calorie turkey sandwich consisting of mostly protein with some carbs and fat then you would burn approximately 50 calories to digest the protein alone!

Hey not such a bad reason for adding a little more protein into your diet... You get to burn more calories without spending more time in the gym!!!

TTFN