It’s likely that your weekly shop is packed with packaging promising that the food inside will taste great, stay fresh and be good for you. You might also find some products telling you they’ll fill you up for longer. But is it really possible for a food to suppress our appetites?
While some research suggests that consuming some foods, such as chilli peppers and ginger, can make us feel less hungry afterwards, these studies often use large quantities of foods and test the effects on animals, says Gary Frost, lead of the Imperial Nutrition and Food Network at Imperial College London. Translating these effects over to humans hasn’t happened, he adds.
But one study looked at the appetite-suppressing properties of capsaicin in chilli peppers, (the active ingredient that gives chillies their heat) using quantities that more closely resemble an average human diet. Mary-Jon Ludy, associate professor of food and nutrition at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, US, experimented first at home, by adding chilli to her meals until she decided what was a palatable and realistic amount for someone living in the US Midwest.
She then invited 25 people into her lab six times, and she fed them bowls of tomato soup. After the soup, they stayed in the lab for four-and-a-half hours so their appetite and energy expenditure could be regularly measured. They were then served another meal and told they could eat as much as they wanted.
When they consumed soup containing 1g of chilli, the participants burned an extra 10 calories in the four-and-a-half hours afterwards. Participants who usually only ate chilli once a month reported having fewer thoughts about food afterwards, and ate 70 calories less when served the second meal, compared to those who usually ate chilli three times a week or more.
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Ludy ran the same experiment with chilli in a capsule instead of soup, but the increase in fat-burning was only found after they ate the chilli-tomato soup.
“This says something important about experiencing the oral tingling/burning sensation,” she says.