This came up in my feed today, and while it isn’t our usual fare about “heat”, but given the benefits touted by the study, I thought it was a good fit for our “curious things” section. The ‘heat’ adds years to life.
From the UNIVERSITY OF VERMONT and the department of flaming hot, comes this study:
Study finds association between eating hot peppers and decreased mortality
Like spicy food? If so, you might live longer, say researchers at the Larner College of Medicine at the University of Vermont, who found that consumption of hot red chili peppers is associated with a 13 percent reduction in total mortality – primarily in deaths due to heart disease or stroke — in a large prospective study.
The study was published recently in PLoS ONE.
Going back for centuries, peppers and spices have been thought to be beneficial in the treatment of diseases, but only one other study — conducted in China and published in 2015 – has previously examined chili pepper consumption and its association with mortality. This new study corroborates the earlier study’s findings.
Using National Health and Nutritional Examination Survey (NHANES) III data collected from more than 16,000 Americans who were followed for up to 23 years, medical student Mustafa Chopan ’17 and Professor of Medicine Benjamin Littenberg, M.D., examined the baseline characteristics of the participants according to hot red chili pepper consumption. They found that consumers of hot red chili peppers tended to be “younger, male, white, Mexican-American, married, and to smoke cigarettes, drink alcohol, and consume more vegetables and meats . . . had lower HDL-cholesterol, lower income, and less education,” in comparison to participants who did not consume red chili peppers. They examined data from a median follow-up of 18.9 years and observed the number of deaths and then analyzed specific causes of death.
“Although the mechanism by which peppers could delay mortality is far from certain, Transient Receptor Potential (TRP) channels, which are primary receptors for pungent agents such as capsaicin (the principal component in chili peppers), may in part be responsible for the observed relationship,” say the study authors.
There are some possible explanations for red chili peppers’ health benefits, state Chopan and Littenberg in the study. Among them are the fact that capsaicin – the principal component in chili peppers – is believed to play a role in cellular and molecular mechanisms that prevent obesity and modulate coronary blood flow, and also possesses antimicrobial properties that “may indirectly affect the host by altering the gut microbiota.”
“Because our study adds to the generalizability of previous findings, chili pepper — or even spicy food – consumption may become a dietary recommendation and/or fuel further research in the form of clinical trials,” says Chopan.
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They didn’t include the paper in the press release, so I dug it out:
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0169876
The Association of Hot Red Chili Pepper Consumption and Mortality: A Large Population-Based Cohort Study
Abstract
The evidence base for the health effects of spice consumption is insufficient, with only one large population-based study and no reports from Europe or North America. Our objective was to analyze the association between consumption of hot red chili peppers and mortality, using a population-based prospective cohort from the National Health and Nutritional Examination Survey (NHANES) III, a representative sample of US noninstitutionalized adults, in which participants were surveyed from 1988 to 1994. The frequency of hot red chili pepper consumption was measured in 16,179 participants at least 18 years of age. Total and cause-specific mortality were the main outcome measures. During 273,877 person-years of follow-up (median 18.9 years), a total of 4,946 deaths were observed. Total mortality for participants who consumed hot red chili peppers was 21.6% compared to 33.6% for those who did not (absolute risk reduction of 12%; relative risk of 0.64). Adjusted for demographic, lifestyle, and clinical characteristics, the hazard ratio was 0.87 (P = 0.01; 95% Confidence Interval 0.77, 0.97). Consumption of hot red chili peppers was associated with a 13% reduction in the instantaneous hazard of death. Similar, but statistically nonsignificant trends were seen for deaths from vascular disease, but not from other causes. In this large population-based prospective study, the consumption of hot red chili pepper was associated with reduced mortality. Hot red chili peppers may be a beneficial component of the diet.
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Peppered with nonsense.
Hmmm…. I do like a good spicy Jambalaya, and there is nothing like a good meal after a difficult day. So toss in another pepper or two and live a little. 🙂
NHANES and the Boston Nurses study have been the source of much of the conflicting nutritional advice we’ve received over the years- salt, carbohydrates, sugars, tooth decay, and others more obscure. The only one I believe they didn’t provoke was saturated fats being bad for you, causing heart disease. That was a pure advocacy hoax. These types of studies, which are purely statistical in nature, are very difficult to design, conduct, and interpret. Even differences of 30% or more aren’t much better than your doctor saying “I think….”. There are hundreds of uncontrolled confounding factors that can’t be measured.
I can remember a few years back there was a study which the press release claimed proved that low calorie sweeteners make you fatter than just using sugar.
But upon reading the details, it turns out they just polled people on whether they drank diet soda or regular, and since the diet soda drinkers were overall heavier, the conclusion was that these non calorie sweeteners fool and confuse some part of the brain that keeps track of caloric intake. Never mind that it seems dubious that this is how our bodies regulate caloric intake…by the sweetness of what we consume.
I just sat there wondering…did it not occur to these braniacs that people who are overweight to begin with are the ones more likely to drink low calorie beverages?
How ironic…to misspell “brainiac”,
“Braniacs” are a different sort of health food nut.
“carbohydrates, sugars, tooth decay,”
Which tend to increase bacterial acid content for caries. Perhaps a Ca(OH)2 (pickling lime) mouthwash??
Love hot peppers! I put habaneros in my salad just to give it a nice tang! 😉
I also love peppers, pepperoni, hot chili peppers and chilli sauce to the steak. But I also love curry and peanut sauce to the chicken. I also love garlic and mustard on buttered bread. Taste is in the eye and palate of the beholder and I think I have kept myself quite well for my age. Perhaps because of my high consumption of spices, who knows. However, I do not feel uneducated and am not a smoker or drinker. So I do not fit into the grid of the study. Thank God.
So if you ‘pun’ish yourself with ‘pun’gent agents you’ve less to fear and living is easy.
Mannometer.