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Fighting salt and sugar cravings, with spicy food
By Lisa Drayer, CNN
There's no magic pill that will cure you of your cravings. But there is something that may help the effort, and it's all-natural.
Research has shown that simply spicing up your diet may help you consume less salt and possibly less sugar, while potentially improving your health even beyond the reduction of salt and sugar.
There is more consistent evidence that spicy food helps curb salt cravings than sugar.
In a study involving more than 600 people from China 1whose brains were analyzed with PET/CT scans, researchers found that regions stimulated by intake of both salty and spicy foods overlapped. Because of similar activities taking place in this shared space (think of the overlapping parts of a Venn diagram), consuming spicy foods effectively enhanced one's sensitivity to salt, thereby helping people crave and consume less salt.
"We think that spicy food can trick 2our brain when tasting salty food. It makes us taste the same (level of) saltiness even when a reduced amount of salt is actually consumed," said study author Dr. Zhiming Zhu, professor and director of the Department of Hypertension and Endocrinology at the Third Military Medical University in Chongqing, China.
In fact, researchers found that people who regularly enjoy spicy foods consumed 2.5 grams less salt in a day (that's 1,000 fewer milligrams of sodium) compared with 3those who typically steer clear of spice. They also had lower blood pressure.
It remains to be seen whether the findings can be replicated in other populations outside China, said Richard David Wainford, associate professor in the Department of Pharmacology at the Boston University School of Medicine, in an accompanying editorial. Still, "a lifestyle intervention that adds taste to the diet, in the form of extra spice and flavor, versus reduction of the pleasure given by the salt we add to our food, may have more success as a public health strategy to promote population-level dietary salt reduction," 4he added.
Spice may have the potential to curb sugar cravings too, though the evidence is mixed. In one study involving 40 students from Denmark, when chili pepper was added to sweet, sour and bitter meals, 5participants experienced a greater desire to eat sweet foods compared with meals without chili added.
In another study, also from Denmark, people experienced a decreased desire for salty and spicy foods when 6they ate tomato soup with cayenne pepper compared with eating the soup without pepper. But their desire for sweet and fatty foods significantly increased when they consumed the spicy soup.
Available at: https://edition.cnn.com/2017/11/17/health/spicy-salt-sugar-food-drayer/index.html. Access on: February 2018.
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