Obesity has become epidemic in the world due to poor eating habits and especially the difficulty in maintaining body weight after the practice of a diet aimed at weight loss (WING and PHELAN, 2005).

Knowing that obesity is a factor that affect global health, several ways of positive energy balance of prevention, which causes weight gain, are often developed through teas and spices.

A spice that has been studied is the pepper. Researchers reveal that the substance capsaicin, contained in its composition, is capable of causing thermogenic effects in both animals and humans. This thermogenic effect is the stimulus for the secretion of catecholamines from the adrenal medulla in the central nervous system sympathetic (KAWADA et al., 1998).

Westerterp-Plantenga et al. (2005) stresses that this substance causes changes in appetite, which can boost your weight loss results.

In pepper, spices other thermogenic appear as possible. One of these is ginger (with bioactive Gengiróis), which were found in rats increases in levels of epinephrine (Iwazaki et al., 2006), but in humans, a study comparing meal with addition of ginger and without the addition , significant differences were found (HENRY, 1987).

Another product is studied mustard, with bioactive isothiocyanate allyl, which was shown to increase metabolism in humans (Henry, 1986), however, in the study it was analyzed, it was combined with the pepper intake, which does not isolate results obtained.

In vitro studies suggest that gengiróis, piperine (contained in black pepper) and allyl isothiocyanate can have effects similar to capsaicin, which had not been proven in vivo (IWAZAKI et al., 2006; OHTA, IMAGAWA and ITO, 2007 ).

Aiming to find more specific results on the use of spices as a means thermogenic, Gregersen et al. (2013) compared the use of black pepper, ginger, horseradish and mustard in various variables. The authors have taken care to have a similar power and changing the spice, smell and appearance were not differences. With regard to taste, using subjective scale, noted that the volunteers had to placebo preference relating to others (noting that the

volunteers did not know which were eating). Comparing the spices, mustard and black pepper showed positive results for taste.

In the same study, there were no increases catecholamine levels (epinephrine and norepinephrine) at any time. The use of spices caused increased diastolic pressure, more pronounced in the consumption of strong roots, however, did not cause an increase in systolic pressure.

Interesting effects were also found in cholesterol markers, where black pepper showed significantly greater reduction of HDL compared to placebo.

The results for the energy expenditure showed that only mustard showed better results than the placebo, the other spices showed no effectiveness.

The literature reports that have thermogenic effect spices 2 to 4 hours after ingestion (Yoshoka et al., 1998) as macronutrients could reach up to 8 hours (WESTERTERP, 2004). Taking this into consideration and the analysis period of 270 minutes after the meal in the study by Gregersen et al. (2013), if they had thermogenic effects, were to have been effective in the analysis.

Apparently the use of these spices (except mustard) does not increase energy expenditure, appetite does not change when added to meal. However, studies with varying amounts and combining more than one spices could cause other results.