Sure, you try and eat food that tastes good, but is it possible to eat food to suppress your appetite?
There’s no doubt that some food fills you up, potentially preventing you from wanting to gorge yourself with more food in the immediate future. But what about actually suppressing your appetite? That’s exactly what some researchers were trying to figure out when they studied chili peppers and the possibility of a pepper’s appetite-suppressing properties.
The research began with an associate professor at home, where she added chilis to her meals.
She experimented a little to find out what a realistic amount might be, then she brought in 25 people to her lab for additional research. The participants dined on bowls of tomato soup. On six occasions, they stayed in the lab for 4.5-hours afterwards to measure their appetite and energy expenditure. Then, they were told they could eat another meal of as much as they wanted. The researcher found when the lab participants ate soup with one gram of chili, they burned another 10 calories over the course of the 4.5-hours they were monitored. When compared to those who normally ate chili at least three times a week, those who usually only ate chilis once a month said they thought about food less afterwards and ate 70 fewer calories in the second meal. The researcher then repeated the experiment with chili in a capsule but did not find the same result in terms of fat-burning.
It's likely those extra 10 calories won’t do much
And eating the spicy meal is more of a short-term solution than a long-term solution in terms of appetite. Obviously, your body needs food to survive, so it’s probably more psychological. However, some foods, like spicy foods, have been shown to fill you up longer and potentially prevent you from overeating in the short-term. For some of us, that may be a good enough reason to choose something new and tasty from the hot pepper scale.
