Metabolism Boosting Foods

Do foods that increase metabolism speed really exist? I have been told that they do. Or is it just that these foods that boost metabolism which induce their influence by causing your metabolism to work harder not faster?

To start with, what are we comparing these metabolism boostingfoods against? Before you begin to suggest there are foods that increase metabolism, you need some sort of control foodsfor comparison.

In our rush-along, everyday lives, many of us consume pre-prepared processed foods so, for the sake of argument let’s use these as the control group to compare against our metabolism boosting foods.

Generally ready-to-eat meals are so refined they are quite easy for us to digest and for our metabolism to convert into energy. So, you could be forgiven for thinking, surely that’s no bad thing? Well no, not really. As everyone knows, processed foods are anything but good for us because they are loaded with salt, fat, refined sugar – you name it and it’s more than likely it’s in your preferred processed food.

Let’s not kid ourselves, our bodies evolved to metabolize and digest foods as nature intended so it is obvious that there are going to be complications when we change that natural state too much. Consequently, all these negative side effects from processed foods induce problems for our [metabolic system|metabolism}. With our bodies clogged up with fats and toxins, our digestions barely manage to cope, and the effect is our metabolism appears to slow down.

So, conversely, it would seem to be true to say that near enough any non-processed food (i.e. natural food) would speed up your metabolism! Indeed, that does seem to be not far short of the truth. After extensive research into foods that speed up metabolism, it appears there is one common denominator throughout all of them. That is, quite simply, that they are in their natural state.

Rather than list them one by one, I have divided them into three simple groups to show foods that make metabolism faster.

Fruits and Vegetables.

Supporters of Vegetarian and Raw Food diets will vouch for this I am sure – because they comprise fibre and complex carbohydrates, fruits and vegetables take more energy to digest than processed foods. This energy comes from metabolism which works faster to cope.

Lean Proteins.

Turkey & Chicken and fish are the greatest source of lean protein as they are naturally with less fat than red meats. Research has indictaed that protein helps speed up metabolic rate because just like fibre it is less easily digested and therefore consumes more energy to digest.

Hot Spices

Cayenne Pepper and Chillies have been shown to temporarily speed up metabolism for around 3 hours because they have thermagenic properties which cause your body to heat up (remember how you break into a sweat if you eat hot chillies?) after consumption by stimulating your body to secrete extra stress hormones which speed up your heart rate and, consequently, your metabolism.

On this evidence it appears to me that although the thermagenic foods actually do make your metabolism work faster, generally foods that ‘speed up’ your metabolism do not so much quicken things as cause your metabolism to work harder to produce the end product.

Ultimately I suppose it doesn’t matter if our metabolism speeds up or works harder. The end result is that extra calories are burnt to carry out the process of metabolising these foods, so there is less waste energy to be turned into fat.