Cinnamon has been long used around the world in both sweet and savoury dishes and drinks. But a new TikTok trend claims adding a teaspoon of cinnamon to your daily coffee (and some cocoa to make it more palatable) for one week can help you burn fat. Is there any truth to this? Not all cinnamon is the same There are two types of cinnamon, both of which come from grinding the bark of the cinnamomum tree and may include several naturally occurring active ingredients .
Cassia cinnamon is the most common type available in grocery stores. It has a bitter taste and contains higher levels of one of the active ingredient cinnamaldehyde, a compound that gives cinnamon its flavour and odour. About 95% of cassia cinnamon is cinnamaldehyde.
The other is Ceylon cinnamon , which tastes sweeter. It contains about 50-60% cinnamaldehyde. Does cinnamon burn fat? What does the research say? A review of 35 studies examined whether consuming cinnamon could affect waist circumference , which is linked to increased body fat levels.
It found cinnamon doses below 1.5 grams per day (around half a teaspoon) decreased waist circumference by 1.68cm.
However, consuming more than 1.5g/day did not have a significant effect. A meta-analysis of 21 clinical trials with 1,480 total participants found cinnamon also reduced body mass index (BMI) by 0.
40kg/m2 and body weight by 0.92kg. But it did not change the participants’ composition of fat or lean mass.
Another umbrella review , which included all the meta-an.