Cinnamon to lose weight: myth and reality

Every few years, a new miracle weight loss food comes on the market. Years ago they were grapefruit pills. Then came the acai berry craze. More recently, people are touting cinnamon as having incredible abilities to help people lose weight. The only reason you haven’t heard more about cinnamon is because it’s cheap and easy to get at the grocery store, so there’s not a lot of money being made selling cinnamon like acai products do.

the claims

You can find articles and forum posts all over the web saying cinnamon can boost your metabolism by 20 fold. You read well. Not 20%, but by a factor of 20.

reality check

It should be immediately obvious to anyone, that if cinnamon increased our metabolism 20 times, anyone who ate cinnamon would burn to nothing unless they ate non-stop, all day long. As someone who has had cinnamon oatmeal for breakfast for years, I can tell you this is not the case. If cinnamon has any effect, it is minimal. That being said, some research suggests that cinnamon has very little useful effect in maintaining or reducing body weight.

What Cinnamon Really Does

Plain old cinnamon you buy at the grocery store doesn’t do much more than make your food taste better (or maybe worse if you put a lot of cinnamon on a cheeseburger).

However, a USDA research team led by Richard Anderson isolated a substance from cinnamon that dramatically increased the ability of people who were prediabetic (ie insulin resistant) to move sugar into their cells. So, in this context, “metabolize” doesn’t mean to burn calories and lose weight, but to process sugars, turn them into fat, and store them. So for healthy people, this doesn’t really have a weight loss effect. However, for people who are borderline diabetic, it helps them process sugars, which is very important for their health.

A couple of things to keep in mind

• The compound Anderson and his team used is a highly concentrated extract of a natural product. Not all natural products are good for us (arsenic, mercury, and rattlesnake venom are all “natural”) and highly concentrated extracts are not, in my opinion, truly “natural.”
• Anderson chose to use only water-soluble cinnamon extracts due to concerns about toxicity (she is under no illusions about the inherent safety of “natural” products. So this may or may not be good for you, but until researchers catch on contact us, the jury is out on the benefits and risks.
• Anderson’s team found some minor effects on weight loss in a follow-up study, but these effects won’t even come close to a good overall diet and exercise plan.
• Know yourself! For me, cinnamon often makes food palatable with less sugar (good!), but it also makes it taste better and makes me want to eat more (bad!). Plus, the smell of cinnamon wakes up my taste buds and takes me to my happy place (good or bad, depending on how much I’ve already eaten that day and what food is available to me at the time).

So you better keep eating cinnamon as it tastes great. But don’t expect the kilos to disappear.