Water is the only thing that truly has zero calories, but a surprisingly long list of foods, drinks, and flavor enhancers come close enough that they’re labeled zero on a nutrition panel. Understanding what falls into this category can help you make smarter choices whether you’re counting calories, cutting sugar, or just curious about what “zero calorie” actually means.
Drinks That Have Zero (or Nearly Zero) Calories
Plain water is the gold standard: genuinely zero calories with no caveats. Sparkling water and mineral water are the same, as long as nothing has been added. From there, the list expands quickly into beverages that are technically not absolute zero but close enough that the FDA allows a “0 calorie” label (anything under 5 calories per serving qualifies).
Black coffee lands at roughly 2 calories per cup. Plain tea, whether green, black, white, or herbal, is similarly negligible. These are the two most popular near-zero drinks worldwide, and they stay in that range as long as you skip the cream and sugar. Iced versions count too. Herbal infusions like peppermint, hibiscus, chamomile, and ginger tea all fall in the same bracket.
If plain water bores you, infused water is a zero-calorie workaround that adds flavor without sweeteners. Cucumber slices, fresh mint, lemon wedges, sliced strawberries, or watermelon chunks steeped in cold water contribute trace calories that don’t register on any meaningful scale. The American Institute for Cancer Research recommends these types of unsweetened drinks as everyday staples.
Zero-Calorie Sweeteners
Several sugar substitutes let you sweeten food and drinks without adding calories. Saccharin contains no calories at all and is 200 to 700 times sweeter than table sugar, so only a tiny amount is needed. Sucralose and stevia-derived sweeteners also contribute virtually no calories per serving. Aspartame technically contains calories (4 per gram, like protein), but because it’s about 200 times sweeter than sugar, you use so little that the caloric contribution rounds to zero in practice.
Sugar alcohols, found in many “sugar-free” candies and gums, are a slightly different story. They’re lower in calories than sugar but not zero. They typically provide about 1.5 to 3 calories per gram compared to sugar’s 4, so products sweetened with them may not be truly calorie-free despite the marketing.
Whether zero-calorie sweeteners affect blood sugar or insulin is still an open question. Clinical trials comparing artificial sweeteners to sugar or water on markers like blood glucose and insulin resistance have produced inconclusive results so far, with no clear consensus on long-term metabolic effects.
Foods Labeled Zero Calories
Very few solid foods hit true zero. The ones that come closest are seasonings. Table salt has zero calories. Fresh herbs used in small amounts, like two leaves of peppermint or spearmint, or a few sprigs of fresh dill, register as zero on nutrient databases. Most dried spices add 5 to 7 calories per teaspoon, which is negligible in the context of a meal but not technically zero.
Beyond seasonings, some foods are so low in caloric density that they’re often grouped into the “zero calorie” category even though they do contain a small number of calories:
- Celery: About 6 calories per stalk, mostly from fiber and water.
- Cucumbers: Around 8 calories per half cup of slices.
- Lettuce and leafy greens: A cup of iceberg lettuce has roughly 10 calories.
- Shirataki noodles: Made from konjac root, these have about 10 calories per 4-ounce serving. That small amount comes entirely from glucomannan, a soluble fiber that isn’t digested in the small intestine. They’re the closest thing to a zero-calorie noodle that exists.
- Pickles (dill): A whole spear has roughly 4 calories.
The “Negative Calorie” Food Myth
You may have heard that certain foods, celery being the classic example, actually burn more calories during digestion than they contain. The idea is appealing but doesn’t hold up. A controlled study tested this directly by feeding celery to omnivorous lizards (a useful model because their digestion can be precisely measured). The lizards lost about 29% of the meal’s energy in waste, another 14% through excretion, and 33% through the metabolic cost of digesting the food. That still left a net gain of about 24% of the energy from the celery.
In plain terms, your body does burn calories breaking down celery, but not enough to erase what the celery provides. No food studied to date qualifies as truly “negative calorie.” That said, foods like celery are so low in calories and so high in water and fiber that eating them regularly does contribute to a negative energy balance overall, meaning they can help with weight loss even if they aren’t calorie-erasing on their own.
What “Zero Calories” Actually Means on a Label
FDA labeling rules allow any food or drink with fewer than 5 calories per serving to be listed as 0 calories. This means a product labeled zero might contain 4 calories per serving. For a single serving, that’s meaningless. But if you consume many servings throughout the day (think cooking spray, which is labeled zero calories for a fraction-of-a-second spray), the actual intake can add up. The trick manufacturers sometimes use is defining an unrealistically small serving size to keep the number under that 5-calorie threshold.
For most people, this distinction doesn’t matter in practical terms. The calories in black coffee, plain tea, herbs, and celery are so low that tracking them precisely adds nothing useful to your day. Where it pays to look more carefully is in packaged products marketed as zero calorie, where serving sizes may be manipulated and where ingredients like sugar alcohols or cream-based additions can push the real number higher than the label suggests.