Black pepper is often the poor cousin: it sits often disregarded (unjustly) beside salt on the dining table and gets far less press than the spicier spice cayenne (chilli). Now however, black pepper is stepping out from the shadows to claim its place in the sun. Although pepper has been popular in Eastern medicine for its capacity to heal digestion and inflammation, it will receive plenty of attention now in a Western society obsessed with weight loss, because it has been shown to contain a compound that stops the formation of new fat cells.
Piperine is an alkaloid that gives pepper its pungent kick. The new research done in the laboratory and using computer modelling has found that piperine interferes with the activity of genes that control the formation of new fat cells. Piperine may also set off a metabolic chain reaction that keeps fat in check in other ways.
The researchers said that the capacity of piperine to stop fat cell differentiation may make it a useful intervention in obesity related diseases.
This research is not the first to focus on piperine. A 2010 study on mice given a diet containing one per cent black pepper had significant declines in body weight and fat around their organs. An Australian study from the journal Cell Biochemstry and Biophysics published in 2011, found that piperine lowered blood pressure, improved glucose tolerance, reduced inflammation, and improved liver function in mice fed a high carbohydrate diet. In another 2011 study published in Molecular Nutrition and Food Research piperine was found to increase the bioavailability of the antioxidant compound resveratrol (from red grapes) by 229 per cent.
You might have to eat a lot of pepper to get enough piperine to have these effects, but even some pepper will provide some piperine and that should yield some degree of benefit and might help keep weight off or even produce weight loss, in the long term. Watch out chilli, because pepper could be the hot new condiment.
