Japan fights flab with fruit

The essential oil of raspberries melts human fat more than three times as much as capsaicin, a red pepper extract.

TOKYO, Japan (Reuters) -- If you want to collect admiring stares at the beach this summer in your hot new bathing suit, eat raspberries by the bushel.

Or if the red berries that sells for $5.79 (780 yen) a handful in Tokyo are too costly, you can try Japanese cosmetics firm Kanebo Limited's raspberry tablets or apply raspberry plasters to your thighs or stomach and watch those unwanted inches melt away.

Kanebo, together with Ehime University and Kumamoto Prefectural University, had been experimenting with foods trying to find an alternative to capsaicin, a substance found in red pepper that dissolves fat.

They found raspberries are even more effective as fat burners than pungent peppers.

What's more, they taste and smell better and do not irritate the skin as red peppers do.

"While trying to find a substance which has a similar chemical structure to that of capsaicin which is known to burn fat, we discovered that raspberry ketone, said Mariko Hara, a researcher at Kanebo's basic research laboratory in Odawara, on the outskirts of Tokyo.

"The essential oil of raspberries, melts human fat more than three times as much as capsaicin," she reiterated.

Kanebo has created diet pills and adhesive sheet-type plasters containing the slimming raspberry substance and plans to market them in May.

"Through clinical tests, 70 percent of those tested were found to have lost about one kilogram after taking tablets with raspberry ketone for a week.

After using plasters for about one month, about five percent of the fat or one millimeter of fat under the area covered by the plaster was found to have disappeared.

We consider this a very new and unique discovery," added Hara.

But if you don't want to sample Kanebo's new products and plan to eat your way thin by including raspberries in your meals, be warned -- they have to be consumed fresh.

Consumption of large quantities of raspberry jam may have the opposite effect.