Background and objectivesEffect of spicy food consumption on health has attracted widespread attention in recent years. However, the relationships between spicy food intake and overweight/obesity, hypertension and blood lipid levels remain unclear. A meta-analysis of available observational studies was conducted in order to explore the associations.MethodsPubMed, Embase, Cochrane Library and Web of science databases were searched for studies published up to 10 August 2021 without language limitation. The fixed and random effects models were selected to aggregate the effect sizes and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) in this study.ResultsA total of nine observational studies involving 189,817 participants were included. Results from this meta-analysis showed that the highest category of spicy food intake significantly increased the risk of overweight/obesity (pooled Odds Ratio (OR): 1.17; 95% CI: 1.07, 1.28;P< 0.001), compared with the lowest category of spicy food intake. Conversely, a remarkable negative association was observed between the highest category of spicy food intake and hypertension (pooled OR: 0.87; 95% CI: 0.81, 0.93;P= 0.307). In addition, the highest category of spicy food intake increased the level of low density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) (weighted mean difference (WMD): 0.21; 95% CI: 0.02, 0.39;P= 0.040), and reduced high density lipoprotein cholesterol level (HDL-C) (WMD: -0.06; 95% CI: -0.10, -0.02;P= 0.268) concentrations, but it was not related to total cholesterol (TC) (WMD: 0.09; 95% CI: -0.08, 0.26;P= 0.071) and triglyceride (TG) (WMD: -0.08; 95% CI: -0.19, 0.02;P= 0.333)] levels.ConclusionSpicy food intake may have a beneficial effect on hypertension, but adversely affect overweight/obesity, as well as blood lipid levels. However, the results should be interpreted cautiously because the present analyses were based on only observational studies and not intervention studies. More large and high-quality studies in different populations will be needed to verify these associations in the future.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12937-023-00857-6.