New Study Finds Eating Spicy Food Doubles Your Chances of Dementia | Hacker News Reader

New Study Finds Eating Spicy Food Doubles Your Chances of Dementia

bestlifeonline.com

9 pointstheonething12 comments

Researchers out of Qatar University assessed the chili intake and rate of cognitive decline of nearly 5,000 Chinese adults aged 55 and older over a 15-year period.

If you are poor and in China, those chilis may be getting dried over an open coal fire. This is known to come with myriad negative health impacts.

At least 3,000 people in Guizhou Province in southwest China are suffering from severe arsenic poisoning. The primary source of the arsenic appears to be consumption of chili peppers dried over fires fueled with high-arsenic coal.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC34284/

Given the limited geographic distribution of study participants, the study might suggest pervasive environmental contamination of hot-pot ingredients instead of a capsaicin effect

What is the capsaicin content of 50 grams of "chili"? What is the scoville measurment of these chilis?

This is totally absurd.

Those who are more chili were more active and had a lower BMI? I'm considered overweight and eat crazy amounts of spicy things. Sounds like a bunch of hooey to me.

Yes, even the study says as much, for example: "In our study, there was a significant difference in chili intake among people with different education levels. Therefore, it is possible that the confounding effect of education may still contribute to the relationship between chili intake and cognitive function." So it's equally possible they discovered that poor people eat more spicy food than rich people in China... If there actually is a causal relationship, we would expect to see much higher rates of dementia in India or Mexico, which doesn't seem to be the case.

> So it's equally possible they discovered that poor people eat more spicy food than rich people in China...

It'd be surprising if that wasn't true, since spicy food is a very regional phenomenon. There are two provinces known for spicy food: Hunan and Sichuan.

If an American study demonstrated that eating Cajun food spiked your odds of being poor, what would that mean?

Bollocks. Seriously.

Pseudoscience bullcrap. Pry my dozen jars of Trader Joe's sweet pickled jalapeños in the pantry from my cold, dead, demented hands. (I'm not even kidding.)

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

If you're downvoting, please just reply with a reasonable explanation why, since I like to learn where I am likely wrong, and you hopefully like to educate someone having a differing opinion. Thanks.

This. It's not science if it hasn't been replicated.

OT: does anybody know if there's a site that tracks which studies have been replicated and which ones haven't?

So much this. If there was a site tracking those studies over time, I'd pay quite a bit of money a month just to be informed.

I've found it useful to just google a particular study + replicated/reproduced. But some time ago I also found https://replication.uni-goettingen.de/wiki/index.php/Portal:... that links to a few resources (that wiki itself is for replication in economics).

I can't find any. Can you help?

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