Making Nice with Spice

Save Indian food, I like all kinds of foods from all kinds of ethnicities. So long as the food is natural and provides the kinds of nutrients every body needs, count me in, I’ll be eating it.

I wish I could say everyone I know feels that way.

Many of my friends are very myopic in their food selections, especially when it comes to spicy foods: They don’t like spice.

For me, it’s all about the hotness. “The hotter, the better,” I always like to say. For them, though, they just can’t bring themselves to enjoy the spicy seasonings that characterize so many Thai, Mexican and Indian foods (again, admittedly, I’m not an Indian food fan).

It’s too bad that they feel this way, because they’re missing out on some serious health benefits.

Spicy foods contain a healthful chemical called capsaicin. You’ve probably heard of capsaicin before as it’s what gives habaneros, tamales, jalapenos and other chili peppers their tear-inducing hotness when bitten into. But this burning sensation goes beyond the mouth and throat; the fiery flames seem to have an effect on cancer cell formation as well.

Dr. Timothy Bates discovered capsaicin’s link to cancer when studying its chemical structure and the prevalence of capsaicin consumption in parts of the world where cancer rates are low, like India and Mexico. According to Bates, it’s no coincidence that cancer rates are low and capsaicin consumption in these countries are high – as the World Health Organization has documented – because apparently the molecules within capsaicin attack the mitochondria and proteins of cancer when they form. In short, capsaicin destroys cancer from within, essentially obliterating its attachment ability to cellular structures. As Bates said, capsaicin appears to serve as cancer’s “Achilles’ heel” – knowing where its vulnerable points are and exploiting them.

Bates and his team of researchers from Nottingham University in the United Kingdom are hopeful that future researchers will look into adding capsaicin into treatments that might help counteract various forms of cancer. Bates and his team witnessed capsaicin’s effectiveness when they exposed the “calor chemical” (“calor” is Spanish for “hot”) to laboratory samples/cultures of lung and pancreatic cancer. Capsaicin killed what were growing cancer cells.

Researchers are hesitant to say a diet high in chili peppers will ward off cancer. But where there’s smoke, there’s fire. In other words, the fact that capsaicin-consuming nations like Mexico and India have low cancer rates seems much more to me than a coincidence.

Friends of mine have always considered spicy food selections dicey food selections, not looking forward to their internal sprinkler systems going off, trying to extinguish the flames ablaze in their mouths. But the mouth adapts to spiciness selections the more often they dot their dinner plates. I’m not sure if that will make them more inclined to try spicy food selections or not.

In the meantime, I’m pretty sure jalapenos will likely never be staples in my friends’ diets, but I hope to make them at least a small part of their diet plans due to the variety of health benefits they provide, many of which I neglected to mention (including lowering blood pressure, increasing the body’s resistance against cold and flu strains and improving skin conditions like psoriasis by enhancing moisture).

Some foods are just too good to pass up. That’s a phrase typically associated with foods that taste so good that one has to eat them, despite their lackluster nutritional profile. It’s just the opposite for my friends and chili peppers; they may not be especially pleasing to their own individual palates, but from a nutritional perspective, they ought to be considered down right delicious because the nutritional benefits are too good to pass up!