Spices to Boost GLP-1

"Spices to Boost GLP-1" If you have people eat the same meal, but chew each bite either 15 times or 40 times, the blood levels of the appetite-suppressing hormone GLP-1 in the blood stream are higher after 40 chews than 15, and those who chewed 40 times ended up consuming about 75 fewer calories than the 15-time chewers. The researchers suggest that chewing more may help people keep their weight down. Okay, but who wants to sit there and count how many times they chew?

What if you just eat chewier foods? What if you have people eat shredded cabbage, which requires a lot of chewing, or the same amount of pureed cabbage; same food, but requiring different amounts of chewing? GLP-1 blood levels were higher in the shredded cabbage chewing group than the pureed cabbage non-chewing one, at 45, 60, and 90 minutes, at least initially.

The researchers were careful to make sure both groups ate at the same rate, because eating even the same food more slowly can result in a greater GLP-1 response. Researchers had people eat the same amount of ice cream over a period of either five minutes or 30 minutes, and those who ate the exact same amount of the same food more slowly experienced a significant boost in GLP-1 levels in their blood for hours after the meal, about a 30 percent bump overall. On average, the participants were overweight, but a lot slimmer than your average American.

What about essentially re-doing the same study, but with obese individuals who could really use the extra GLP-1 boost? And here we go. As you can see from the title, the researchers found disparate results when they tested obese adolescents versus obese adults.

With the obese teens, researchers saw the same outcome as they did with the overweight adults; a significantly higher GLP-1 response after slower eating. But the rate of eating didn’t seem to matter in obese adults. Same thing with satiety.

Obese adolescents felt fuller, more satiated for longer when eating more slowly, but speed of eating didn’t seem to matter in the adults with obesity. But, at least for some, more chewing and eating more slowly may raise GLP-1 levels, no matter what’s consumed. But are there certain foods that specifically boost GLP-1?

In my last video, I went through a bunch of foods, beverages, and supplements that don’t appear to work, but there are a few spices that might. Volunteers were served rice with vegetable curry made with three different doses of spices. The bland control meal had no spices at all, just tomato puree with eggplant.

The low-spice meal added a tablespoon of curry spices, plus onions, garlic, and ginger. And the third variation, the high-spice curry, had double the spices, two tablespoons. The spices were turmeric, coriander seeds, cumin seeds, dried Indian gooseberry powder-- also known as amla-- cayenne pepper, cinnamon, and cloves mixed in the ratio of eight to four to four to four, to two to one to one, respectively.

And the average bump in GLP-1 blood concentration for those eating both the low-spice and high-spice meals were 17 and 32 percent higher, compared to the bland control meal without the spices. About the same calories and macronutrients, but the spicier meals raised GLP-1 levels higher. But which spice was it?

Ginger compounds boosts GLP-1 in mice but not rats, and in humans, we appeared to react more like the rats: no effect. For many of the other spices, there isn’t even in vitro data, but rather only in silico, meaning just some kind of computer modeling that didn’t actually test anything in a biological system. But we do have data on curcumin, the yellow compound found in the spice turmeric.

This study used 180 milligrams of curcumin, which is the amount found in a single teaspoon of turmeric. The researchers also tested fish oil supplements, but while the fish oil failed, the curcumin reduced the blood sugar spike after a meal, which is something both GLP-1 and GLP-1 drugs can do, though GLP-1 levels weren’t directly measured. The researchers suggest it may be a GLP-1 effect, since curcumin stimulates GLP-1 in rodents, as well as cells in a Petri dish, but there hasn’t been a human study until now.

Six months of curcumin supplementation led to a quadrupling of GLP-1 levels, compared to placebo. Okay, so, turmeric may help. What about cinnamon?

Scandinavian researchers gave people rice pudding with and without one or three grams of cinnamon, which is about a third of a teaspoon, or a full teaspoon. And those getting the full teaspoon of cinnamon more than doubled the GLP-1 bump-from-baseline compared to the control pudding without the cinnamon. So, that’s another spice that may work, though people didn’t report feeling any more satiated eating the cinnamon-y pudding compared to plain.

And finally, the third spice to boost GLP-1 in humans? Cayenne pepper. What happened when a half a teaspoon of cayenne pepper was added to a meal?

Over a short period of time-- 15 minutes-- a single spicy meal significantly increased blood levels of GLP-1. Though, like in the cinnamon study, this did not appear to translate into them feeling any fuller, but the researcher didn’t measure actual subsequent food intake.