From pain
comes pleasure
Adrenalin plus
natural opiates
form an
unbeatable
combination
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.
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. Mr Waters
sells “hot apple chili jelly” as a condiment for meat, and chili-infused olive
oil.
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. 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.
