Red hot chili peppers don’t only make your food tastier. It seems they also helps you lose weight by increasing your energy expenditure after the meal. Isn’t this great. You basically ad chili peppers to virtually any food and make it taste better.
The compound found in red hot peppers responsible for burning the fat away is capsaicin. Capsaicin is the substance responsible for making peppers spicy and your body hot. Have you ever started to sweat and feel a rush of heat taking over your body after biting on a red hot pepper. Well that effect seems to be responsible for activating your metabolism and burning more energy.
If you can’t stand to eat hot peppers then the following news will make you happy. It seems there is a version of capsaicin which isn’t spicy at all. It is called dihydrocapsiate or DCT and it has the same effects as capsaicin it seems.
In a recent study done at the UCLA Center for Human Nutrition the researchers put 34 volunteers on a very low calorie liquid meal for 28 days. At the end of the dieting period the volunteers also took a pill containing different dosages of DCT. Some of the subject got a high dosage, some a low dosage and some got a placebo pill.
The researchers measured the weight and amount of body fat of each participant in the study at the beginning and at the end. According to the data collected during the study the volunteers that consumed the highest amount of DTC had the highest energy expenditure also. For a couple of hours after the meal they produced almost twice the amount of body heat than the placebo pill tanking group did. And to make all that excess heat the body had to burn more calories logically. The study also showed an increased fat oxidation in the volunteers who took the DTC pills. This means that their body used more fat as fuel after the meal.
The conclusion of the study was that people may benefit from using DCT or red hot chili peppers to "provide metabolic enhancement to weight management efforts". It seems that this study has opened the door for more future studies on the possibility of using spicy peppers or DTC as weight loss boosters.