Moderate but not high daily intake of chili pepper sauce improves serum glucose and cholesterol levels

Chili and its main active ingredient capsaicin have been shown to induce several favorable biological activities. In the present study we have tested the effect of three chili sauces mimicking popular commercially available chili sauces with an increasing amount of capsaicinoids on a broad range of serum biochemical markers in thirty healthy subjects. We show that in the region where daily use of chili is traditionally low, moderate consumption of 4.4 mg of capsaicinoids per day has beneficial health effects, such as decrease in glucose level, LDL cholesterol and C-reactive protein. However, when a product with higher daily dose of capsaicinoids (16.7 mg/day) was consumed, those effects were lost. Considering that biochemical marker levels returned to the initial levels after a week-long wash-out period, we suggest that regular intake of moderate amounts of chili product would be most profitable.