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.
When they consumed soup containing 1g of chilli, the participants burned an extra 10 calories in the four-and-a-half hours afterwards.
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However, burning 10 extra calories after a spicy meal is minute, and won’t have any long-term effects. Frost points out that studies like this, showing short-term effects on appetite, haven’t been able to show any long-lasting effects.
In accordance with this study, a review of 32 studies found that chilli, as well as green tea, hasn’t been consistently found to suppress appetite.
