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Comment by hirundo | Hacker News Reader

Suggestion works on taste buds too. In the nineties I had a thing for salsa and ate it most days at the office over things I steamed in the microwave. But I ate the mild salsas and couldn't tolerate the hot stuff. Still can't.

So my boss decides to spice it up a bit, and mixes in some hot salsa. I didn't notice. Each day he gradually added more until it was all the hot stuff. I didn't notice. He went out and bought hotter stuff. For some reason the whole office was watching me when I made some quiet comment about the mild salsa being hotter than it used to be. They thought that was pretty funny.

But I really didn't notice. If you can lie to the tongue, why not the liver?

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You build up tolerance to hot stuff pretty quickly (and lose it pretty quickly). And most commonly-available salsas (even labeled "hot") top out at not-actually-very-hot. If your boss was only gradually adding more and more of the hot stuff, I absolutely believe that he could have just built up your tolerance such that you didn't notice; regardless of suggestion.

> And most commonly-available salsas (even labeled "hot") tops out at not-actually-very-hot.

Yeah, that's what I always thought. Then I moved to New Mexico, and got my tongue, gums and throat handed to me on a plate.

Which brand? “Red or Green?” Even Sadie’s is quite a bit hotter than anything I generally find in California.

XX Hot (cultivar) are particularly good - clocking in at 60k Scoville units

Gordon Ramsay did some food shows in India. In one of them there is a hot pepper eating contest. He tests and bows out. A woman won by eating the most in a given time (maybe a minute), she beat the other contestants but not the record; so to up it, she rubbed the peppers into her eyes to win a bonus prize. WTF!! The audience seemed to “appreciate” it.

Apparently there is a gene for pain sensitivity, this Norwegian talk show[1] hosts [2] got their tested and their sidekick has a higher tolerance for pain. They tested this by putting their hands above some tea lights from 9:30 onwards.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQBs2xPDGKU (English subtitles available) [2] Incidentally they're the ones who made the hit "What Does the Fox Say?"

When I say "commonly-available", I mean "big national brands that you can find in a supermarket anywhere in the country". With less common/local brands, yeah, some are actually quite hot.

Please don't assume that other users here are all from US of A.

The same is true in Mexico

But is there a biological mechanism for "building up a tolerance"? Seems possible that building up a tolerance is merely a mental exercise as well. Perhaps in the subconscious part of the brain at least.

Good question, one that I don't know the answer to. But I know an experiment that can help us find out! Spicy-hot is a complex phenomenon, but it is my understanding that a large part of it is that the capsaicinoids react with the heat receptors in your mouth to adjust their baseline temperature; making them react to normal temperatures inside your mouth as if they were physically burning hot. If tolerance is a purely mental exercise, then I would expect that I would not be able to accurately judge temperature of things in my mouth after consuming very spicy food; if I can accurately judge temperature then this would suggest that there is a biological mechanism at play.

I eat very spicy food and I've noticed for a while now I've lost the ability to detect when I'm being burned in my mouth (at all, it's actually a bit of an issue sometimes). The rest of my body is the same as it always was - save for my fingers, which I can use to flip things in hot oil (probably a result of exposure to hot oil). Perhaps you are on to something :)

Chef hands come from calluses and the nerves in your fingers dying a little, I think! It's pretty useful tbh

Yup! There’s a neurotransmitter for registering the compounds that trigger that hot sensation, and that neurotransmitter gets depleted over time, based on exposure. I don’t know the exact timeframes, but it’s on the order of days/weeks.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substance_P

Is it something similar for temperature? In my country some people go swimming all year around - even when the lake is covered in ice (they cut a hole). They say if you go everyday from summer to winter, you don't notice the temperature change and it's not such a big deal.

I’m not aware of anything like Substance P for temperature sensation. If I had to guess, it sounds more physiological— circulatory system adaption to handle colds exposures (e.g. blood vessel diameter). Maybe someone else here knows more and we can both learn!

I despise the trend of having "hot" mean "mild", "very hot" mean "mildly hot", etc. Possibly the most ridiculous is Sabra hummus where the Supremely Spicy flavor is less spicy than the jalapeño flavor. Hats off to Cheetos for having possibly the most mainstream product of all but still managing to put actual heat in their "Exxxtra Flamin' Hot" version.

At least in NYC most immigrant establishments will serve you "white people hot" if you don't ask for "regular hot". Saying this as a white Polish, it took me a while after moving there to realize that I was being served a "white people hot" hot, and also that apparently Poles love their food way hotter than other (most?) European nations. That's even more interesting if you consider our otherwise fairly bland national cuisine. It's rather unusual for a Pole to avoid spicy food at all – if someone does, it is a notable exception.

Once I learned it, I would place my orders saying: "– Yes, hot please. Your hot, not mine."

As for spicy snacks, nothing can beat Takis Fuego! :)

A farmer carried a baby bull calf across his field every day. As each day passed, the calf grew a little more and became slightly heavier. Just a little bit more weight each day.

By the time the calf had become a bull, the farmer was so strong he could carry a bull the length of his field while talking on his cell phone.

Or so they say...

that sounds like a really messed up thing for you boss to do to you

Your story "proves" all the studies with sommeliers where they duped them into rating white wines (with red food coloring) as fancy red wines. All the sommeliers failed the blind tests. In fact all those studies showed was that the taste of wine stemmed primarily from the perception of the bottle rather than the actual taste.

Might want to refresh your reading on this. AFAIK this is reference to one (unpublished) study where undergrad wine science students tended to choose from a list of descriptive terms usually associated with red wine to refer to dyed white wine, most of the time.

It's certainly true that suggestion can change ones perception of wine (or any flavor), but I don't think it's clear that it's the primary factor.

Yes, this is correct —- it’s actually a fascinating study, but the translation from French was done poorly and then the English-speaking media ran with the clickbait version.

The original study finds that the terms we use for flavor (partly) encode the tuple of flavor and color. That is, given two identical smelling / tasting liquids, subjects will pick different vocabulary to describe the flavor when the liquid is red vs clear.

There appears to be abundant evidence that wine-tasting is largely nonsense, including experiments done on wine judges: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/23/wine-ta...

There's evidence that wine judging is less objective than most people involved in it seem to believe. I'm not sure that justifies calling it nonsense, or misrepresenting a study as showing that experienced people can't even distinguish white from red.

The link I provided does not cite that study.

It does actually, but that wasn't really my point in referring to it. More that the GP post misrepresenting the study isn't justified by other evidence of a lack of rigour in the field.

Why should red and white wines taste so distinguishably different anyway? Because one is red colored and one is white? So what? Seems like your contempt here falls prey to the same biases as the sommeliers.

Of course, you're not supposed to be an expert. But still, seems like a hypocritical thing to make fun of someone else for.

Because there is a fundamental difference in how they're made: red wines spend more time in contact with grape skins, while white wines don't. Grape skins contain tannins and other compounds that end up in the wine, and humans can perceive these compounds. You might question whether there is enough difference to warrant the perceived difference in flavor, but there are definitely quantitatively measurable differences in composition of typical red and white wines that would lead you to posit that they would taste different.

I'm not saying they're literally the same. There are also invisible differences between any two wines that have MUCH MORE impact on the taste profile. Red and white can even be the same grape. Are the skins really more impactful than, for example, the type of grape, how the wine was aged, or for how long?

Why is the color so important? Mostly because it's visible to us noobs.

>Because one is red colored and one is white? So what?

So what depends on why things are different colors. For instance, red velvet cake is just vanilla cake dyed red with food coloring. In that case, there wouldn’t be a difference in taste. On the other end, vanilla bean ice cream has black specks distributed throughout from the contents of the vanilla bean itself. If you substituted black pepper, it might look the same but it would not taste the same. As Niksko explained, red and white wine are different due to differences in ingredients and different processes which impart different flavor and color.

Red velvet is actually chocolate cake dyed red.

Yes, thank you. I knew it, but still wrote vanilla.

Yeah, I'm aware of that. See my other comment. I don't know enough to say whether the impact on flavor is proportionate to the impact on color. I'd like to say I'm wise enough to realize that the dramatic change in color is very likely to be more impactful, or at least allow for the possibility.

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