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Density functional theory (DFT) calculations and molecular docking have been carried out on natural products containing eugenol, gingerol, ascorbic acid, oleurpoein, piperine, hesperidin, quercetin, Luteolin, and curcumin in order to predict their biological activities and to analyze their pancreatic lipase inhibition. The biological activity predictions are based on the global and local chemical descriptors, namely, HOMO-LUMO gaps, chemical hardness, chemical potential, electrophilicity, dipole moment, and Fukui functions. Our findings show that the studied compounds can be divided into two groups based on the chemical descriptors; the first group is composed of eugenol, gingerol, ascorbic acid, and oleuropein and the second one is composed of piperine, hesperidin, quercetin, Luteolin, and curcumin depending on the HOMO-LUMO gaps and electrophilicity values predicting best reactivity for the second group than the first one. The frontier orbitals offer a deeper insight concerning the electron donor and electron acceptor capabilities, whereas the local descriptors resulting from Fukui functions put emphasis on the active sites of different candidate ligands. The molecular docking was performed in order to compare and identify the inhibition activity of the natural candidate ligands against pancreatic lipase which were compared to that of synthesized ones. The molecular docking results revealed that the Luteolin compound has the best binding affinity of -8.56 kcal/mol due to their unique molecular structure and the position of -OH aromatic substituents., Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11224-023-02176-2., Competing Interests: Conflict of interestThe authors declare no competing interests., (© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2023, Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.)