Naples: Italian scientists has created a new diet pill that fills you up as if you have eaten a whole bowl of pasta.

The new 500mg pill which is drunk with two glasses of water is made of cellulose powder that expands 1,000 times its original size – it effectively becomes the size of a tennis ball in the stomach.

Professor Luigi Ambrosio, of the National Research Council in Naples, the lead researcher in the project says,”The sensation is like eating a nice plate of spaghetti.”

The pill has been tested on 20 people for a month last year, and is now being tested on a further 90 people at the Policlinico Gemelli hospital in Rome until October this year.

A new company known as Academic Life Science has been created to market the pill which . He hopes to be selling the pill by next May.

Professor Ambrosio, said the cellulose from which the pill is made comes from a natural substance found inside plants and has a beneficial action on the gut.