How Many Calories in a Kiss?

By Terry Dunkle, Diet Power Founder and Editor-in-Chief

If you're talking about a Hershey-style kiss, according to Diet Power's Food Dictionary it contains 26 calories. More than half of those calories come from fat. But since most of the fat is unsaturated and the chocolate contains only smidgens of cholesterol and sodium, it can almost be considered a health food.

If you mean the other kind of kiss, however, it's only one calorie—or, rather, minus one. That's because a kiss, like any other form of exercise, burns calories instead of adding them to the larder. (The one-calorie figure is only an estimate. Some of the nerds in my office are looking for a graduate student in physiology who might want to measure it more precisely for her master's thesis.)

You won't find "kissing" in Diet Power's Exercise Log, but you will find another popular activity that kissing sometimes leads to. You-Know-What burns between 3 and 12 calories per minute, depending on your weight and the, uh, level of enthusiasm.