Making one small change to your meals can help you eat less and feel fuller

This simple hack doesn’t need to stop meals from being tasty but could help you feel full sooner and eat less

Making one small change to your meals could be the secret to eating less and feeling full. Turns out a little bit of spice to your food can help limit caloric intake, according to new research from scientists at Penn State University’s Sensory Evaluation Center.

The team found that adding just a small amount of heat to meals can slow down how quickly we eat, leading to a natural drop in calorie intake.

The findings, set to be published in the October issue of Food Quality and Preference, suggest that turning up the heat a notch with some spices could be a surprisingly simple way to help people cut back.

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“We know from earlier studies that eating more slowly can lead to consuming significantly fewer calories,” explained lead author Paige Cunningham, a postdoctoral researcher who earned her doctorate in nutritional sciences from Penn State in 2023.

“We wanted to see if adding a bit of spice to a meal would slow people down enough to actually make a difference.”

The researchers put their theory to the test with three experiments featuring two popular dishes, beef chili and chicken tikka masala, served either mild or spicy.

They found that adding a boost in spiciness using dried chili pepper slowed down eating rates and cut back on how much people ate, all without making the food any less tasty.

“This points to added chilies as a potential strategy for reducing the risk of energy overconsumption,” said study co-author John Hayes, professor of food science at Penn State.

“It wasn’t our explicit aim to study portion control, but our results suggest this could actually help.”

Interestingly, the study found that drinking water didn’t differ whether meals were spicy or mild.

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“That’s why it’s so important to test this properly in the lab,” said Hayes. “What you’d expect isn’t always what’s really going on.”

Instead, the real reason behind eating less seemed to come down to how spicy food forces people to slow down.

By slowing the pace of your eating and keeping food in your mouth longer, the brain is given more time to register fullness and leading to eating less overall. Participants also reported feeling just as full after spicy meals as they did with the mild versions, despite consuming less food, the study found.

So if you’re trying to eat a bit less at dinner tonight, the researchers have a simple tip: add a little kick of chili to your meal.

“It might just slow you down enough to help you eat less,” Hayes suggested.