TASTELESS, colourless, odourless and painful, pure capsaicin is a curious substance. It does no lasting damage, but the body’s natural response to even a modest dose (such as that found in a chili pepper) is self-defence: sweat pours, the pulse quickens, the tongue flinches, tears may roll. But then something else kicks in: pain relief. The bloodstream floods with endorphins—the closest thing to morphine that the body produces. The result is a high. And the more capsaicin you ingest, the bigger and better it gets.
Which is why the diet in the rich world is heating up. Hot chilies, once the preserve of aficionados with exotic tastes for cuisine from places such as India, Thailand or Mexico, are now a staple ingredient in everything from ready meals to cocktails.
One reason is that globalisation has raised the rich world’s tolerance to capsaicin. What may seem unbearably hot to those reared on the bland diets of Europe or the Anglosphere half a century ago is just a pleasantly spicy dish to their children and grandchildren, whose student years were spent scoffing cheap curries or nacho chips with salsa. Recipes in the past used to call for a cautious pinch of cayenne pepper. For today’s guzzlers, even standard-strength Tabasco sauce, the world’s best-selling chili-based condiment, may be too mild. The Louisiana-based firm now produces an extra-hot version, based on habanero peppers, the fieriest of the commonly-consumed chilies.
But for the real “heat geeks”, even that is too tame. Tesco, Britain’s biggest supermarket chain, recently added a new pepper to its vegetable shelves: the Dorset naga. Inhaling its vapour makes your nose tingle. Touching it is painful; cooks are advised to wear gloves. It is the only food product that Tesco will not sell to children. By the standards of other chilies, it is astronomically hot. On the commonly used Scoville scale (based on dilution in sugar syrup to the point that the capsaicin becomes no longer noticeable to the taster) it rates 1.6m units, close to the 2m score of pepper spray used in riot control. The pepper that previously counted as the world’s hottest, the Bhut Jolokia grown by the Chile Pepper Institute at the New Mexico State University, scored just over 1m. That in turn displaced a chili grown by the Indian Defence Research Laboratory in Tezpur, which scored a mere 855,000. The hottest habanero chilies score a wimpy 577,000.
The naga, originally from Bangladesh, was developed commercially by Michael Michaud, who runs a specialist online chili supply firm in south-western Britain. Having spotted it in an ethnic-food shop in the coastal town of Bournemouth, he bred a dependable and much hotter strain and had it tested. “I sent the powder to a couple of labs. They didn’t believe the reading. They thought they had made a mistake,” he recalls. Jonathan Corbett, the buyer who handles (cautiously) specialist chilies for Tesco says that the naga makes a standard hot curry “taste like a bowl of breakfast cereal”.
The naga has been a runaway success. In 2007, a Tesco outlet in Newcastle in northern England was supplied with 400 packs for a pilot period that was intended to last a month. The entire stock sold out on the first morning. According to AC Nielsen, a market-research firm, demand for hot chilies across all British retailers rose by 18% in the last year. At Tesco, the growth has been 29%. Demand for the naga has been so high that it has been forced to sell unripe green ones, intended for sale early next year. Tesco’s supplier is Britain’s biggest chili farmer, Filippo Salvatore. Based near Biggleswade, he is also a leading light in the Bedford Sicilian Association. He is hurrying to grow more.
Tesco is one of the world’s largest retailers, with outlets in both continental Europe and North America. But Mr Corbett says that his colleagues have no plans to stock the naga elsewhere, for example in the firm’s Fresh & Easy chain in America. “Tastes in the UK are hotter,” he says. That may be true, though the chili-eating milieu is certainly bigger in America, where the calendar is dotted with events such as the rumbustious Fiery Foods and Barbeque Show (in Albuquerque) and the more academic 19th International Pepper Conference (which took place in September in Atlantic City, concluding with a barbecue).
For connoisseurs though, the macho hullabaloo about ever-hotter chilies is distasteful, even vulgar. Steve Waters, who runs the South Devon Chili Farm, says even the idea that the spectrum runs on a simple one-dimensional axis between “hot” and “mild” is misleading. He prefers the more complex Mexican matrix, which categorises chilies both by heat, and whether they are fresh, dried, pickled, or smoked. Any of these can produce big changes in flavour: he highlights the Aji (pronounced ah-hee), a Peruvian chili, which “ripens to bright yellow, with a strong lemony taste when fresh, very zesty. When dried it picks up a banana flavour.”
From this point of view, the most interesting trend is not in ever-higher doses of capsaicin for the maniac market, but in the presence of chili in a range of foodstuffs that previous generations would have regarded as preposterous candidates for hotting up. Chili-flavoured chocolate, for example, has gone from being a novelty item to a popular mainstream product.
The reason may be that capsaicin excites the trigeminal nerve, increasing the body’s receptiveness to the flavour of other foods. That is not just good news for gourmets. It is a useful feature in poor countries where the diet might otherwise be unbearably bland and stodgy. In a study in 1992 by the CSIRO’s Sensory Research Centre, scientists looked at the effect of capsaicin on the response to solutions containing either sugar or salt. The sample was 35 people who all ate spicy food regularly but not exclusively. Even a small quantity of capsaicin increased the perceived intensity of the solutions ingested. Among other things, that may give a scientific explanation for the habit, not formally researched, of snorting the “pink fix” (a mixture of cocaine and chili powder).
A chili-eating habit may develop to a startling degree (your author guzzled a packet of nagas while writing this article, and puts Tabasco in his coffee). But indulging in capsaicin does not quite meet the formal medical definitions of addiction. It is at most a craving, not a physical necessity. It does not cause loss of control when taken to excess, or illness in those deprived of it: heavy users may develop remarkable degrees of tolerance, but they do not require regular doses simply in order to feel normal. The preference does not wear off: ex-smokers, by contrast, may gag at the taste of a cigarette. And the effect on the brain is different: with nicotine, the more you smoke, the more you want.
Indeed, capsaicin has useful medical effects. By disabling a part of the nervous system called “transient receptor potential vanilloid 1” it can stop the body registering the pain caused by rheumatoid arthritis, for example. It can also be used to help patients with multiple sclerosis, amputees, and people undergoing chemotherapy. With rather less scientific evidence, a capsaicin product is marketed as an alternative to Botox, a wrinkle-smoothing cosmetic treatment.
But does it do any harm? The use of pepper spray as a weapon, and chili powder as a means of torture, suggests that it must. Certainly capsaicin can be painful, causing stress: in itself a potential health risk. A big dose incapacitates. But as far as permanent physical damage is concerned, the evidence is negligible to non-existent.
That seems to contradict common sense, which suggests that hot food causes an upset stomach—or what medical specialists call “gastric mucosal injury”. A study in 1987 on the effects of ordinary pepper produced some signs of gastric exfoliation (stripping away the stomach lining) and some bleeding—though the effects were less than those produced by aspirin. An alarming-sounding experiment a year later involved volunteers being fed minced jalapeño peppers through a tube, directly into the stomach. The results, observed by an endoscope (a camera on a tube) revealed no damage to the mucous membrane. Against that is a study of heavy chili-eaters in Mexico City, who appeared to have higher stomach cancer rates than a control group. But the rate of illness had no correlation with the frequency of chilies eaten, leading to speculation that other factors may be at work.
Humans are the only mammals to eat chilies. Other species apparently reckon that nasty tastes are a powerful evolutionary signal that something may be poisonous. Paul Rosin, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, who is one of the world’s best-known authorities on the effects of capsaicin, has had no success in persuading rats to eat chilies, and very limited success with dogs and chimpanzees: the handful of cases where these animals did eat chilies seemed to be because of their strong relationships with human handlers.
That offers a clue to the way in which mankind comes to develop a chili habit. In the same way as young people may come to like alcohol, tobacco and coffee (all of which initially taste nasty, but deliver a pleasurable chemical kick), chili-eating normally starts off as a social habit, bolstered by what Mr Rozin calls “benign masochism”: doing something painful and seemingly dangerous, in the knowledge that it won’t do any permanent harm. The adrenalin kick plus the natural opiates form an unbeatable combination for thrill-seekers. Just don’t get it in your eyes.
Haha, I really want something super spicy now. I was going to go to a wings place last night to get some really spicy wings, but I went with a group and the restaurant was so packed (Wednesday night is Trivia Night apparently) that we ended up going to Chipotle. Prolly my favorite restaurant ever, so I was perfectly fine with that too, but the wing place was known for INCREDIBLY spicy wing sauce. Maybe I can get a few friends to go out next week or somethin.
I'm starting this fancy shmancy MASTER CLEANSE diet this next week, meaning I shall have a lack of food, and it will be awesome. If you decide to put pictures on here of the delicious food you are making/eating, take joy in the fact that it will make me that much hungrier ^_^
Doctors? Fuck doctors. Did you know that so called "doctors" use science to solve their problems?
FACT: 1000% of all technological breakthroughs in the past 5,000 years (the age of the earth) were NOT achieved through science. RATHER, it was God's divine will giving inspiration to these men (and only men) that caused our society to move forward.
FACT: Doctors use science.
FACT: The super cleanse diet or whatever the heck it's called was inspired by a dream. That means GOD gave it to the man who invented it. How can it be bad? HOW CAN GOD'S GIFT BE BAD!? HE GAVE US OIL!
FACT: I will receive $1,000,000 dollars, jet-pack, hover-craft, Porsche, and time machine from President Lincoln tomorrow while trying out my new yacht.
FACT: I will receive $1,000,000 dollars, jet-pack, hover-craft, Porsche, and time machine from President Lincoln tomorrow while trying out my new yacht.
FACT: Please?
I believe that implies that you already have a new yacht...then maybe you'll get a visit from Lincoln!
Master cleanse? I really don't see that as being healthy. It's another one of those diets for people who can't function in moderation. I never understood why anybody would want to take an all-or-nothing approach to something like this. You can't stick with it forever and whatever it is supposed to fix probably won't be "fixed" the way you want it to be and will go back to the way it is now shortly after you quit.
This is a short lived "band-aid" approach to dieting. Just so you understand that.
I had a friend who did that. He said it was terrible, and it didn't really help him out at all. He dropped a couple pounds, yeah, but they came back after he got off the diet.
It's ideal if you have to be at a certain weight for a short period of time, like a weigh in for something, but for long term relief it's not wise.
I only get to see my boyfriend for 2 days so this works out great for me! If I gain it all back, eh, I'll be fine.
I've been dieting regularly ever since I got back to school too, the whole not eating as much ((actually thats mostly because I have around NO money)) and going to the gym everyday; I'm amazingly impatient when it comes to self-improvement, however, so I figured, what the hey! Let's try out this diet for a week, see how much weight I can lose. So far I have not been hungry, and the only cravings for food is really only a longing to sink my teeth into something, less actually wanting food in my tummy. Salt water flush is DEFINITELY the worst part though. Ugh. Nothing good from that. At all. *Shudder*
It's also a bit of a personal challenge. Lets see if I can go a whole week without solid foods
Since my family has started going to this asian supermarket on a semi-regular basis, I tried making shoyu ramen. The only thing I have to compare it to is cheap, packaged ramen, but I think it came out really good. Also, my step-dad's reaction to the fact that it had seaweed in it was fun to watch, I guess it wasn't a staple of his diet growing up in Nebraska.
Only if you have a very very good webcam, very high production quality (kidding), and a good stage voice. Honestly though, make sure to have EXCELLENT lighting and a high quality ACTUAL camera if you do this, or it won't work how you'd like.
DAMMIT! Just cause I made a penis pretezel in 7th grade home-ec and just because I sent you penises toroughout college and just ebcause I still send you penises at random....where was I going with this?
Adam made tacos in Japan, of all places! IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to make tacos in Japan and he did it! with the pervert. And me. But mine had beans in them, and didn't taste like tacos at all.
Comments
I will report any side effects of overusage of tabasco to you guys in approximately 3 years, the time it will take for me to show symptoms.
Chilies
I'm starting this fancy shmancy MASTER CLEANSE diet this next week, meaning I shall have a lack of food, and it will be awesome. If you decide to put pictures on here of the delicious food you are making/eating, take joy in the fact that it will make me that much hungrier ^_^
I still think this isn't the greatest idea... but I'll try to post yummy food here anyway. Maybe it will coerce you back.
(You did notice the stuff at the bottom about how doctors do not recommend this diet, right?)
FACT: 1000% of all technological breakthroughs in the past 5,000 years (the age of the earth) were NOT achieved through science. RATHER, it was God's divine will giving inspiration to these men (and only men) that caused our society to move forward.
FACT: Doctors use science.
FACT: The super cleanse diet or whatever the heck it's called was inspired by a dream. That means GOD gave it to the man who invented it. How can it be bad? HOW CAN GOD'S GIFT BE BAD!? HE GAVE US OIL!
FACT: Please?
I believe that implies that you already have a new yacht...then maybe you'll get a visit from Lincoln!
:takethat:
This is a short lived "band-aid" approach to dieting. Just so you understand that.
It's ideal if you have to be at a certain weight for a short period of time, like a weigh in for something, but for long term relief it's not wise.
I've been dieting regularly ever since I got back to school too, the whole not eating as much ((actually thats mostly because I have around NO money)) and going to the gym everyday; I'm amazingly impatient when it comes to self-improvement, however, so I figured, what the hey! Let's try out this diet for a week, see how much weight I can lose. So far I have not been hungry, and the only cravings for food is really only a longing to sink my teeth into something, less actually wanting food in my tummy. Salt water flush is DEFINITELY the worst part though. Ugh. Nothing good from that. At all. *Shudder*
It's also a bit of a personal challenge. Lets see if I can go a whole week without solid foods
*drools*
HE CANT BE TRUSTED
The more you eat, the more efficiently your digestive system functions!
Wait, that's not right.