Is extremely spicy food unhealthy?

Some think that extremely hot food gets rid of anything nasty in your system. Others believe it is NOT healthy at all. It depends upon who you listen to. Surely, there must be something palatable in between.

Spicy foods have been known to speed up your metabolism.

I worked with a woman that died of throat cancer and her doctor told her it “could have” been caused from the extremely spicy foods that she ate all the time. I want to add that she smoked at least 3 packs a day, so I’m not sure how he came to that conclusion.

Certain hot spices such as red pepper have antibiotic properties. But that which fights the bad bugs tends to harm good cells too. As life evolved, the animal kingdom sprung up and began to gleefully eat the vegetable kingdom for lunch. Plants couldn’t run away, but they could fight back. Survival drove them to develop toxins that would poison insects and animals eating them. These toxins come with their own strong hot or bitter taste to serve as a warning of their presence.

Evolution of course, didn’t just work in the plant kingdom. Animals evolved organs like the human liver that can filter out potential toxins before they have a chance to do the body harm. So generally, if you keep the spicy foods within reason, they add zest to your life and do you no harm. They may be more foreign to certain bugs that invade and feed on animal bodies, and thus some bacteria might have no defense and actually be killed off by the spicy foods you consume. So enjoy in reasonable moderation. But don’t sign the release and burn your taste buds into kingdom come. :)

I’ve ate at Cluck U before, they take that hot sauce very seriously. I’ve tried some of their sauces, but never made it to the hottest one.

I haven’t really ever heard of anything bad happening to anyone after eating there, but I’m sure if you ate enough of it, it could cause some damage.

I think their claim and waver-signing is just an example of good marketing savvy in action.

But I’m like you. I never even cook with ordinary pepper and don’t miss it. I was delighted to find out that Anne Burrell (a very successful chef) never uses pepper in her cooking either.

But, that being said, I think that the health benefits of spicy foods far outweigh the downsides.

I suppose that if someone has an active ulcer, this could potentially be damaging. Likewise, if someone has GERD that could aggravate things also.

But for a normal healthy person, it might tend to desensitize their tastebuds, but that’s kind of minor as far as damage goes.

There are tons of people in India and other tropical climes for whom very spicy food is a way of life. It also helps them i n regulating body temperature as well as preserving food and killing off unfriendly internal organisms.

Everything I’ve ever read about ultra spicy foods has been favorable for regular healthy people.

Nevertheless, it hasn’t brought me into the camp. I guess I just have ultra sensitive taste buds and mucuous membranes. I just can’t tolerate the burning and stinging. It add zero to my enjoyment of food as it becomes way too distracting.

:D

Well, @Buttonstc… that’s sort of why I asked about tastebud desensitization. I used to work with an almost exclusively Indian population while I was working in the lab on overnights, and I would watch them shoveling this food into their mouths no problem. One let me try these things that looked like giant rice crispies and I almost wanted to find a mirror to see if my tongue was smoking and my nostrils were burping flames. Yet they’re eating this stuff like M&Ms. I can’t see how, unless your tastebuds have been partially fried off the tongue and zapped into submission… lol

I guess if you’ve been fed this type of food from childhood, there might be some oversensitive tastebuds getting zapped.

But the other possibility may be genetics. The spice habits of various cultures stretch back centuries. I could see how some combination of location and genetics could produce far less children with oversensitive tastebuds. Hard to know.

Maybe you could ask some of them if they remember back to a time in their childhoods when eating food this spicy was unbearable to them. That would be really interesting.

Are we born being able to tolerate highly spiced foods or does sheer hunger outweigh sensitive tastebuds in cultures where hot foods predominate?

Interesting.

I don’t work with them anymore, or I would. Same company, different building and shift hehe

But it is really interesting to wonder how that all happens.

Ya sometimes it may be unhealthy…

Spicy food isn’t just an overwhelming level of spices. Its not as if you’re literally burning your tastebuds or ruining them. The spicy sensation actually comes from the saliva glands, not the tastebuds – you become accoustomed to spicy food by exposure. This is not detrimental to your ability to taste, in fact – once you can tolerate hotter peppers, you start to taste their actual flavor. Now in the case of certain hotsauces, like Death Sauce or sauces made from the ghost pepper, the only point is the burning and there really is no flavor. And like another poster said, the waiver thing isn’t because of a legitimate medical concern; its just a marketing tool.

@kraftlos Welcome to Fluther and thanks for correcting my error. I looked it up, and you are quite right.