Besides the fact that capsaicin has antibacterial effects and exerts indirect disease-alleviating effects during bacterial infections (something our ancestors had to deal with a lot), eating chili triggers an endorphin high, but regularly eating chili makes you less sensitive and hence you have to eat more chili to get your little high. Taken together, these two properties of chili most likely have been the main drivers of it being adopted as a staple food in many cultures.
I’ve gotten to a point where I prefer to drink a hot spicy soup in a cup over many things. If I drink coffee, it also always burning hot with a solid mix of cream, sugar and cinnamon. One of the things it helps me achieve is a small warmth that also helps me sleep.
I don’t even resort to hot sauce for the broths anymore, just cutting up one or two small chili peppers makes the soup hotter.
The soups are becoming a really good diet trick because they have little to no calories (but have insane amounts of sodium).
Some chicken bullion, ginger/lemon grass (paste or the real deal), chili peppers, black pepper and salt has truly started becoming my morning coffee.
Drinking regularly drinks that are too hot significantly increases the risk of throat cancer. I can't find the paper anymore that I read few years ago, but they did check various cultures where drinking very hot tea is traditional, controlled for other factors and the results were not nice. IIRC the threshold where risk became significantly higher was around 70-75 degrees celzius.
I mean think about it - around 60 degrees C proteins are getting hammered in all cells. Doing frequent small burns in cells lining your throat damages them (also teeth), make it a habit and bad things will eventually happen. There wasn't enough time to develop protection when we moved from hunters and gatherers.
That your specific brain interprets this as somehow pleasant isn't telling much, some people get off on extremely painful experiences that nobody normal considers a good idea.
Biochemist who went to med school: very hot beverages will indeed cause tissue damage, and can cause oral cancer.
Though English uses the same word to describe both (“hot”), there is no relationship between “spicy” food and high temperature stuff, apart from the fact that they both stimulate pain receptors (but in very different ways, one being harmful and the other being harmless).
Why does tissue damage increase the risk of cancer? My guess is that more damage -> more cells created to replace damaged ones -> more opportunities for mutation. Is that right? If you bite the inside of your lip a lot, is that bad? Uh, asking for a friend.
When you have damaged tissue you must replace it sooner. Tissue replacement is by division of cells, which carries the risk of a transcription error. If the wrong error occurs and is not caught you have cancer.
Basically this, but perhaps a slightly more accurate explanation is that tissue damage causes inflammation, which is angiogenic, proliferative (which you hint at) and generally increases the risk of cancer.
Yes, constantly biting your lip (I’m talking about injuring the tissue, not just nibbling) will increase your risk of oral cancer too.
It’s not something most people do super often, so I’m not sure if we’d even have a risk measurement for that. In almost all cases of accidental biting risk is basically nil / negligible… But theoretically nonzero.
It’s a well-established principle, and is one of the main reasons why smoking anything in general will cause lung cancer, why hepatitis frequently leads to liver cancer, why IBD frequently leads to bowel cancer, why alcohol consumption causes oral cancer, etc.
When you say harmful are you suggesting the pain receptors themselves are damaged by "spicy" substances? Is that why we develop increased tolerance? Though many people don't seem to, even after 40 or 50 years or eating spicy foods on an at least weekly basis.
Pain receptors that are activated by burning are indicating something harmful is occurring to your body not because the receptor is actually activated, but because of the cellular damage that triggers the receptor.
On the other hand, capsaicin doesn't activate pain receptors by cellular damage. It activates pain receptors by allowing a flood of (Na+? Ca2+?) ions through cellular walls. This triggers the pain receptors to fire without the cell damage. That is a laymen's description of reference [1].
It's interesting because the biochemistry of spicy foods differs by the 'spicy' compound. Capsaicin isn't the only one at play, wasabi and horseradish-containing foods have an entirely different molecule responsible for producing the spicy sensation, allyl isothiocyanate.[2] If you're a fan of spicy peppers and horseradish, you have definitely noticed the difference in how the 'heat' manifests: capsaicin-containing foods cause areas of damaged skin or mucus membranes to feel painful, usually localized in the mouth or around nail beds of those preparing the peppers.
Horseradish on the other hand, with it's spicy-ness provided by allyl isothiocyanate, produces a heat that - for me - is more located in the back of the head or in the upper sinus cavities. A completely different sensation than that of capsaicin.
Unfortunately, I don't know what the biochemical method of action is to produce those feelings. I'm sure it is buried deep in the literature, but it isn't on the wiki.
All my snacks now are some sort of crispy vegetable with very hot chili powder, a little bit of salt and lemon juice.
Chop up some cucumbers/radish/Lima beans/tomatoes/carrots/chickpeas etc. add a chili powder, lemon and salt and I’m good to go. Ready in seconds and way better than eating potato chips and gives me a little bit of an endorphin rush.
Oh come one, I obviously don’t chop the lima beans or chickpeas. I don’t peel carrots, wash and then chop in under 20 seconds per carrot literally. If I want to make them really fine I use a peeler to thinly slice them into discs (I’ve gotten very good at this, can probably do a carrot in a minute. I don’t have a mandolin slicer).
Actually with a mandolin and skipping peeling you literally could do a carrot in 4 or 5 seconds, but the slices tend to be so thin you'd have trouble eating them as finger food. Anyway I'm keen to try your suggestion.
Also in the same vein if you want to try things out. Take eggplant/squash/beans/spinach etc., chop them up into cubes, slice some onions and some garlic, add a half teaspoon of black mustard, a pinch of whole cumin, some asafetida, salt, whole dried red chili peppers, about a table spoon of fresh grated coconut (you get frozen packs of pre grated coconut), and some tamarind or lemon juice in a pot. Cover, let it simmer or medium high for 10 mins and there’s another health snack to go. The whole thing takes me 15 mins to make and I can snack throughout the day.
Living in Japan, it’s very hard to find properly spicy food or nice chilli sauces. I’ve resorted to just eating plain cut chilli. A while back, I experimented with not adding more spices than was already provided in my meals. No pepper, no chilli. After about a month, I started experiencing new tastes and flavours from foods I’ve always ate. It was amazing.
But I craved that endorphin high from spicy foods and have fallen back to my old ways.
One of the hottest things I've ever eaten was at a Korean-run Japanese curry house in NYC.
IIRC you chose spiciness on a 1-5 scale. The first time I tried a 2 and it was damn spicy. Next time I tried a 3 and it ruined my lunch, my pride, my afternoon, and my evening.
There are plenty of curry places in Japan that do spice levels too.
However normal Japanese curry tends to be pretty mild as well as other food in Japan, including Japanese style Chinese places which often serve dishes like mapo tofu with no spiciness whatsoever.
There are Japanese curry places in SoCal that charge extra (~25-50c per level IIRC) per spice level. Since I couldn’t handle any more than 2/10 I found that a win-win :)
> eating chili triggers an endorphin high, but regularly eating chili makes you less sensitive and hence you have to eat more chili to get your little high
I wonder what is the evolutionary reason for that. The older you are, the more defense you needed against bacteria?
But our sensitivity to temperature doesn't decrease with age, if anything the opposite... even if that's more obvious with ambient rather than tactile temperature (which I'd imagine are processed quite differently by our nervous systems).
I always thought that the endorphin high is unrelated to the beneficial effect: any strong pain is normally followed by a release of endorphins to compensate. It's why pain and pleasure are often difficult to disentangle. A strong dose of capsaicin will induce a painful sensation in the mouth (you'll feel like burning), which is compensated by a release of endorphins.
I thought only Aussies (and Kiwis) called them that... though apparently the term is used in India and Singapore too.
(Yes I know it's the correct botanical term for the plant, but we use it for the food too).
Besides the fact that capsaicin has antibacterial effects and exerts indirect disease-alleviating effects during bacterial infections (something our ancestors had to deal with a lot), eating chili triggers an endorphin high, but regularly eating chili makes you less sensitive and hence you have to eat more chili to get your little high. Taken together, these two properties of chili most likely have been the main drivers of it being adopted as a staple food in many cultures.