Could eating spicy foods help you lose weight?
“Simply adding chili pepper to a meal — just enough to make it spicy without changing how much you like it — might help reduce how much you eat,” Dr. Paige Cunningham, a postdoctoral scholar at Pennsylvania State University, told Verywell Health.
Cunningham was the lead author of a recent study published earlier this year in the journal Food Quality and Preference. In it, the researchers found that eating rate slowed and food intake was reduced when perceived spiciness increased.
In chili peppers, there is capsaicin, the compound that gives them their heat. The compound is believed to trigger heat production in living organisms and boost metabolism.
“Capsaicin helps increase your core temperature, increase metabolism and helps burn calories faster,” Piedmont Atlanta Hospital clinical dietician Haley Robinson explained in a statement. “Research has shown that it could increase your metabolism by up to 5 percent.”
Chiles and other spices might also affect hunger, with people who eat spice-rich diets more likely to eat less during the course of the day.
“There’s some research that capsaicin acts on the hypothalamus — the part of the brain that controls hunger and fullness,” Patricia Bridget Lane, a registered dietitian with the Cleveland Clinic, said.
Notably, there’s no research proving that eating majorly hot Carolina reapers or ghost peppers, which contain more capsaicin, have higher benefits.
Capsaicin is the main ingredient for cayenne pepper and chili powder, but other versions have been found to have benefits.
Researchers at Harvard say people who regularly eat chili peppers appear to lower their risk of dying from heart disease and that people who ate spicy foods nearly daily had a 14 percent lower risk of death than people who did so just once a week.
But, also take benefits with a grain of salt and be careful about how much you consume.
“Chili peppers are often consumed with high-fat, high-calorie foods, meaning that more frequent chili pepper consumption is tied to more frequent high-calorie food consumption,” Dr. Thomas Holland, a physician-scientists at Rush University, previously told Medical News Today.
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