Sweat it out
Chili peppers also may help people lose weight. However, a person can’t simply eat hot, spicy food and expect to shed pounds. “It’s not a magic remedy,” warns Baskaran Thyagarajan. He works at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. As a pharmacologist, he studies the effects of medicines. His team is now working to create a drug to make the body burn through fat more quickly than usual. A primary ingredient: capsaicin.
In the body, capsaicin triggers a stress reaction known as the fight-or-flight response. It normally occurs when someone (or some animal) senses a threat or danger. The body responds by preparing to either run away or stand and fight. In people, the heart’s beating will speed up, breathing will quicken and the blood will send a boost of energy to the muscles.
To fuel the fight-or-flight response, the body burns through stores of fat. Just as a bonfire chews through wood to produce hot flames, the human body turns fat from food into the energy it needs. Thyagarajan’s team is now working on a capsaicin-based drug aimed at helping obese people — those who have more stored fat than their bodies need — to shed their excess weight.
In a 2015 study, his group showed that mice that ate a high-fat diet containing capsaicin did not gain extra weight. But a group of mice that ate only the high-fat diet became obese. Thyagarajan’s group hopes to start testing its new medication on people soon.
Other researchers have already tried similar therapies. Zhaoping Li is a doctor and nutrition specialist at the University of California in Los Angeles. In 2010, Li and her colleagues gave a pill containing a capsaicin-like chemical to obese volunteers. The chemical was called dihydrocapsiate (Di-HY-drow-KAP-see-ayt). It did help the people lose weight. But the change was slow. In the end, it also was too small to make much of a difference, Li believes. She suspects that using capsaicin would have had a bigger effect. Still, she argues, it would never work as a weight loss remedy. Why not? “When we convert the dose that worked on mice or rats to humans, [people] don’t tolerate it.” It’s too spicy! Even in pill form, she points out, capsaicin gives many people upset stomachs.
But Thyagarajan says his team has come up with a spice-proof way to get capsaicin into the body. A doctor would inject the drug directly into areas with a lot of fatty tissue. Magnets would coat each particle. The doctor would use a magnetic belt or wand to hold the particles in place. This should keep the capsaicin from circulating through the body. Thyagarajan believes that this would help prevent side effects.