Spice up your food! Red chillies help shed flab

Agencies : London, Mon Jul 09 2012, 15:25 hrs

Adding spice to your food can be a new way to get rid of that beer belly for a new study says that

red chillies battle the bulge in a three-fold-way.

According to the tests conducted by food scientist Stephen Whiting, red chillies burn fat, suppress hunger pangs and boost overall calorie-burning rates due to the presence of a key chemical component - capsaicin.

Capsaicin provides red chillies the required heat to trigger an adrenalin rush which in turn orders the brain specifically to burn fat cells and tests found fat around the belly was burned most rapidly, said Whiting who is based in the Manchester Metropolitan University.

Midriff fat is the most dangerous, as it increases the risk of heart disease.

Whiting found chillies also helped to suppress appetite plus they speed up the body's overall metabolism, the rate at which a person burns off calories, the Daily Mail reported.

For a decade, dietitians have studied the impact of chillies on the human metabolism, but this is the first time the three-fold effect has been confirmed.

“If you eat chillies consistently for a good period of time, it will help you lose weight,” Whiting said.

This is because capsaicin, the chemical that gives chillies and chilli-based spices such as cayenne and paprika their characteristic pungency, stimulates a natural process whereby some of the food we eat at each meal is converted immediately to heat.

Dubbed as diet-induced thermogenesis, the process comes as a good news for dieters because it means they burn up the calories automatically rather than storing them.

Scientists have found that diet-induced thermo genesis usually uses up carbohydrates, with various studies showing

that we produce more heat after a high-carbohydrate meal – say pasta or rice - than after a meal of fatty food.

What this means is that if we were to eat two meals with the same calorie count, one high in carbohydrates, the other high in fat, our bodies would automatically burn up more of the calories in the high carbohydrate meal than they would in the fat-heavy meal.

According to the studies reported in the British Journal of Nutrition when men and women eat chilli-spiked food, they feel less hungry and eat significantly less at subsequent meals.

Intriguingly, the researchers have also found that adding chilli powder to food tricks people into thinking that the meal contains more fat than it actually does.

This is important because we're programmed to enjoy fats and oils, which is why we find it so hard to stick to a low-fat diet.

Scientists have also found that for obese or previously obese people, this preference is even more pronounced, making passing up fat-laden food even harder.

They also point out that it's in dieters' best interests to make their meals as delicious as possible, because the more we enjoy our food, the higher the level of thermogenesis.