Red hot chilli peppers the next diet fad?

With one-third of the world’s population estimated to be overweight or obese, we clearly need a solution - but one that’s easy to implement. What if more food was the answer? Researchers from the University of Wyoming think they’ve hit on a solution, using capsaicin from chilli as a diet-based supplement.

If restricting our calorie intake were easy to do, obesity and related health complications might not be so ubiquitous. The beauty of the capsaicin solution is that it increases metabolism without the need to restrict calorie intake.

At the Biophysical Society’s 59th Annual Meeting in Baltimore, the researchers described how dietary capsaicin may stimulate thermogenesis and energy burning by activating its receptors, which are expressed in white and brown fat.

“Obesity is caused by an imbalance between calorie intake and energy dissipation,” explained Vivek Krishnan, a graduate student working in Dr Baskaran Thyagarajan’s laboratory at the University of Wyoming’s School of Pharmacy.

“In our bodies, white fat cells store energy and brown fat cells serve as thermogenic (heat produced by burning fat) machinery to burn stored fat. Eating calorie-rich food and a lack of physical activity cause an imbalance in metabolism that leads to obesity.”

Feeding mice a high-fat diet with 0.01% capsaicin didn’t reduce the amount of food or water they consumed, but it did significantly increase their metabolic activity and energy expenditure.

The researchers hypothesise that dietary capsaicin induces browning of white fat and stimulates thermogenesis to counteract obesity.

“The main goal of our work is to expand the knowledge of the mechanism by which capsaicin antagonises obesity, as well as to advance the proof of principle of the anti-obesity potential of dietary capsaicin,” the researchers said.

The researchers’ abstract is available here.