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Comment by Tade0 | Hacker News Reader

I grew up in a family that ate spicy food on a regular basis. So much so that we had one case where the waiter, seeing children at the table, advised us against taking what we wanted, namely a pizza named "diablo".

I watched him as he waited to intervene a few steps from us, platter in hand. Eventually he gave up.

In any case my experience, after 30 years of eating spicy food, is that I apparently don't feel the usual effects people who like spicy food do.

What happens instead is that the spice forces me to eat slower and thus get more flavour out of the dish. After all, "spicy" is technically not a flavour, so it mixes well with just about anything.

I did have a period of gradually increasing the dose, though, at the end of which I discovered that capsaicin is also excreted through urine. It is not a pleasant experience.

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Capsaicin receptors also get “used up” over periods of long exposure, so you become less sensitive to the sensation. It sounds like you’ve been exposed to it your whole life, so have simply adjusted to it.

If you abstained for an extended period of time (6 months?) that Diablo pizza would probably blow your head off.

I've noticed ie in India that long time exposure severely numbs all your taste buds, so folks end up over-salting, over-sweetening etc. which definitely goes in bad direction re long term health. Or one can accept that non-spicy foods taste very bland, which is rather sad world TBH.

Many ie french are like this, they politely refuse going extreme re chilli, but once you get to fine tastes of that cuisine that would be completely gone you understand them. And join them, even as Indian/curry food lover

Kinda why I don't care for spicy food, it feels to me like bandaid for not making food actually tasty in the first place without the spiciness...

I feel like the word "spice" is doing the work when we really mean "heat". There is a lot of variance in the spice used in India, and a lot of them can contribute to the feeling of heat or "spice" that Indian food is famous for outside. There are a lot of spices in Indian cuisine which are the primary sources of taste and character in dishes, while not necessarily being "hot".

>I've noticed ie in India that long time exposure severely numbs all your taste buds

You sure it's the chillis? People's sense of taste also decreases significantly due to exposure to time (aging).

>What happens instead is that the spice forces me to eat slower

Thats interesting. It is the opposite for me. When I get hit by spicy/hot I start shoveling more and more food into my mouth to lessen the hurt. Somehow I find air hitting insides of my mouth after some super-spicy food more painful than more of the same spicy food :p. I couldn't figure it out.

I find that food tastes bland without spice. I carry around capsicum powder for when eating out in case they don't take spice sincerely enough. Edit: handling ghost peppers easefully is my current tolerance level.

> After all, "spicy" is technically not a flavour

Spicy IS the flavor, you're confusing Spicy food with Hot food.

Someone attempted to argue with me that vanilla ice cream is "spicy" because vanilla is a spice. While pedantically true, that's not a person I'd ever want to eat dinner with.

But it is an annoying ambiguity in English. You would probably say that curry paste is spicy even it had no capsaicin, which does happen. People also mean "has spices" when they say "spicy". I have heard Russians use the word Russian word "bitter" to describe the pain sensation of capsaicin too.

I prefer the Spanish word "picante" - stingy. It stings, it causes pain. It's not a flavour like a spice would be.

If you're expecting English words to have a single meaning, you're in for a rough time.

The problem is that there just isn't a good English word to distinguish it, I have to explain every time that I don't mean flavour, I mean pain. (Russian also has this problem, ambiguity is in every natural language.)

What word have you heard used to describe spicy food? I have only come across острая which is "sharp".

I have heard older Soviet Russians use the word горко, but this was about ten years ago. They were trying to express that the food tasted bad and they really just called it bitter when they meant it had capsaicin.

I've found this distinction to be dialect-dependent. That is Indians tend to make a sharp distinction between spicy and hot, and Americans tend to treat spicy and hot as synonyms.

Spicy, as in "using chili peppers," meaning it has capsaicin gives a bit of a lie to this. You literally just add capsaicin to food to make it spicy in many places. Is how they can give a number score to how spicy to make it. Leaving out the capsaicin does not change the base flavor profile at all.

Now, it is confusing, as spiced food is typically not spiced with capsaicin. Rather, spiced food has traditional spices and is often not spicy. (Think spiced rum. Not "hot" at all.)

>What happens instead is that the spice forces me to eat slower

This is why I get spicy alcoholic drinks.

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