For one, there’s strong evidence to suggest that consuming spicy food can help you maintain a healthy weight. While that’s not the case, it is true that eating chiles can temporarily rev up your metabolism. In order to generate heat, the brown fat cells need to draw on energy reserves stored in other fat cells. “Therefore, brown fat is ‘good fat’ that fights ‘bad fat’ by burning it down when activated.” So by eating spicy food, you’re in essence burning up white fat in the body. At the end of the day, spicy food is just hard to eat quickly.