Start consuming chili pepper to stay slim as it contains capsaicin. Findings suggests that the chief ingredient in chili peppers – Capsaicin, stimulates energy burning, a dietary supplement could be developed to do away with restriction in calorie intake.
The researchers found that dietary capsaicin — 0.01 percent of capsaicin in the total high fat diet — prevented high-fat-diet-induced weight gain in trials with wild type mice. Researchers noted that dietary capsaicin may induce browning of white adipose tissue and stimulates thermogenesis to counteract obesity.
Vivek Krishnan, a graduate student from the University of Wyoming in the US explained that the group’s laboratory data revealed that dietary capsaicin suppresses high-fat-diet-induced obesity.
“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,” Krishnan explained.
Developing a natural dietary supplement as a strategy to combat obesity can be easily advanced to human clinical trials.
The researchers added that they envision a nanoparticle-based sustained-release formulation of capsaicin, which is currently under development in our laboratory. In turn, this will advance a novel dietary supplement-based approach to prevent and treat one of the life-threatening diseases, obesity and its associated complications — in humans.
The findings were presented at Biophysical Society’s 59th annual meeting in Baltimore, Maryland.
