Hot chillies might be good for us

Since moving away from the south east where my seasonal allergies were terrible I've actually used hot chillies instead of allergy meds. My symptoms are mild enough that the flushing of all the mucus is enough to keep them at bay for a week or so. It's been wonderful for me since every allergy or antihistamine puts me to sleep so it was difficult to function if I had to take them.

>By the way, a great way to relieve the "pain" is by eating bread

Interesting. Similarly, I've read that drinking water will not relieve it, maybe since it causes the chili oils to spread around more in your mouth.

I prefer the really pungent chilis. Ghost pepper and habenero and scotch bonnet are all very hot, yes, but they have these wonderful sweet fruity tastes that are just delightful.

I don't know about bread, and don't quite see why that might work. From my understanding, something like milk is great because it has a good amount of fat in it. As capsaicin is a fat/oil soluble molecule, it helps wash it away by dissolving it, and as a liquid, gives a huge surface area for contact with the capsaicin.

Ice cream is a great and tasty way to relieve the heat from hot peppers.

Aren't chipotles smoked ripe (red) jalapeños? I have to second pasilla chiles as well. Toasting them over a flame and blend them into soup stocks is one of my favorite uses, personally.

> By the way, a great way to relieve the "pain" is by eating bread

Bread does basically nothing; dairy is generally the most effective food (specifically, the casein protein in it apparently helps, as apparently does the fat) to mitigate spiciness (sour cream or yogurt are popular forms for adding to spicy food for this purpose.)

My favorite chilli variety is "Fatalii". It's similar to Habanero, but with IMO a superior flavor, and higher yield whenever I've grown them. It's both hot and strongly flavored.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatalii

Here you go:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/27/spicy-food_n_162820...

In short, they eat spicy food because it makes you sweat, which is the mechanism to cool your body down.

My guess is that it's because spices grow well in hot climates. Spices are popular everywhere - consider how expensive spices were in temperate climates before easy global trade. If they're cheaper then they're more likely to become a major part of the country's cuisine.

Depends on what you mean by "spicy". If its just spicy as in use a lot of spices like nutmeg, turmeric etc. well it makes food a LOT more flavorful. You can experiment with different combinations to get different flavors.

If you mean spicy as in "hot" (capsaicin content)... some people just love that flavor, and I imagine a lot of Indian people do. But not universally...I'm not a big fan, although my cousins will eat raw green chilies without batting an eye. I've always wondered how its possible...perhaps some taste buds are not very receptive so you get a better kick out of it?

Another theory I've heard was that food was scarce in India so the food would be made hot because you feel fuller after eating less (or are discouraged from eating too much). Not sure if its an accurate theory though...

You don't feel so hungry in hot climates, so it stimulates digestion a bit.

Chilies in Asia are not from there, they came from the Portuguese during the period when they dominated the black pepper trade and also owned a colony in what is now Brazil. pepper went to Europe and chilies went to India. Before then capsaicin was unknown there. Mexico I imagine also got chilies directly from the south.

Having lived in hot & cold climates, I presume it has to do with spoilage. Before convenient refrigeration and sterile packaging, many people were simply in a race to eat food before it went bad - when the supply of food was limited. Spicier foods, I presume, either mask the decay to the palate, or kill off more microbes - more a necessity where hotter year-round, vs being able to refrigerate or freeze food by merely setting it outside much of the year.

By spicy I think you are referring to "hot spicy" as in peppers as opposed to cardamon, clove, cumin and all those wonderful spices. "hot spciy" i.e heat form peppers is really Southern Indian food, even though the rest of India gets plenty hot temperatures as well.

This was a a result of the Portuguese brining it to India from the new world(along with Christianity from Europe.) These were two of my first impressions of traveling from North to South in India - "hmm the food just got wonderfully hot and wow there are all of sudden a lot of churches")

I've heard these pseudo-scientific explanations like "makes you feel cooler" as well but I think it's really just an acquired palate over time in areas that the Portuguese were trading in.

That being said I have a folk remedy for when I feel like I;m getting sick with a fever which is to order Thai curry and ask for it 'Thai hot." This usually gets a laugh and a request for confirmation. It appears to me to help the fever break. Placebo or not, I have no idea.

Interesting how many different explanations you're getting. People also seem to be tripped up by your use of "spicy."

In the US (to my knowledge), "spicy" is generally meant as "hot spicy." To describe something that has many spices but is not "hot spicy," people just say something is "full of spices."

As another commenter said, and as I learned it long ago: Spicy food makes you sweat. As the sweat evaporates, it requires additional energy to go from liquid to vapor. It gets that energy from the surface of the skin in the form of heat, thus cooling the body.

One theory I read is that hot climates tend to produce more hot or pungent plants, as these chemicals are often insect repellents. And the tropics lack winter, which gives plants an annual break from insects. They're under constant attack, so they evolved more potent defenses. So part of it is just that these hotter flavors are just more available in hotter climates.

It's especially nonsensical considering humans have done more to spread chilli peppers than birds. Birds never brought chilli peppers to my country but humans farm them here commercially.

Richard Dawkins constantly reiterates this point in his book The Selfish Gene, constantly reminding us that genes aren't actually "selfish" and don't actually have wants, but these anthropomorphisms are useful shortcuts for communicating the subject-matter.

Yeah the uncoerced choice to eat chillis is a major potential confounding factor. It's really not for everyone and frequently seems to have something to say about the environment you were brought up in & the type of food you normally eat.

There was a larger study done in china a few years earlier with more differentiated results and the correlations are indeed interesting: http://www.bmj.com/content/351/bmj.h3942 . But yeah, not a good article.

Why do you think these researchers were so incompetent that they didn't control for even blindingly-obvious factors like age? Are you familiar with their other work in the field, or something?

"Correlation does not equal causation" is parroted more often by pseudo-intellectuals than scientists, now. It seems that many interpret it as "correlation is not causation and is therefore garbage which can tell us nothing".

Correlation implies causation, which is why scientists proceed from there in search of proof. You're trying to contend it doesn't prove, and thereby imply the whole of the research involved is wrong.

Incoherent accusations, poor punctuation, and profanity correlate with incompetence. They don't prove you are, but you certainly might be.

The article has a link to the original research paper. If you read it, you find:

> Total mortality for participants who consumed hot red chili peppers was 21.6% compared to 33.6% for those who did not (absolute risk reduction of 12%; relative risk of 0.64). Adjusted for demographic, lifestyle, and clinical characteristics, the hazard ratio was 0.87.