It’s likely that your weekly shop is packed with packaging promising that the food inside will taste great, stay fresh and be good for you. You might also find some products telling you they’ll fill you up for longer. But is it really possible for a food to suppress our appetites?

While some research suggests that consuming some foods, such as chilli peppers and ginger, can make us feel less hungry afterwards, these studies often use large quantities of foods and test the effects on animals, says Gary Frost, lead of the Imperial Nutrition and Food Network at Imperial College London. Translating these effects over to humans hasn’t happened, he adds.