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Hot peppers and health

502F

502F

I have done lots of digging but cant find any difinative answer regarding the heath benefits/risks of consuming large quantities of capsaicin regularly. Some sources say it is harmless and even improves the metabolism, while other sources caution against mass regular consumption. What are your opinions on the matter?
 
Capsaicin is def. good for the human body in a number of ways it is very healthy, but no matter how healthy things are they should be used in moderation. In other words instead of consuming a bottle of pure capsaicin extract which is around 16 million SHU at least thats what I saw it at. It would be better for you to eat a hot pepper or hot sauce in small amounts or salsa etc. Its cool as long as its in the right amounts!
 
Well, look at places like Jamacia, Mexico, Thailand, India, some parts of China, and etc. Now, with that said I would caution against jumping into spicy food and say, putting bhut jolokia powder on everything you eat when you are not used to the heat, but I have yet to see a definitive peer reviewed study that will pull me away from the peppers. I see far more studies claiming the benefits of peppers than condemning them.

It's been proven hot peppers do not cause ulcers, but they will irritate existing ones. If you have no stomach illness or chronic stomach pain (IBS, Chrones, ulcers, etc) then I have yet to see anything that says hot peppers are bad.

With that said, I have read that they can irritate your intestines if you eat too much, so I would introduce them to your diet slowly. There is no shame in starting with jalapenos and working your way up to habaneros and etc.
 
If someone could tell me how to post a PDF file on here, I'll post an article and a report that I wrote for my Chemistry class last year.
 
I don't think you can post PDF files on here, unless they are hosted elsewhere and linked on the forum. You can, however, convert a .pdf to a .jpg fairly easily, and you can then upload the images on here.

Hope that helps.
 
502F said:
I have done lots of digging but cant find any difinative answer regarding the heath benefits/risks of consuming large quantities of capsaicin regularly. Some sources say it is harmless and even improves the metabolism, while other sources caution against mass regular consumption. What are your opinions on the matter?
Click to expand...
A simple google search will return many good articles on the benefits of hot peppers.
Cultures that eat them regularly tend to have much less incidence of certain diseases and conditions.
 
Very interesting topic. I tell my wife that me eating peppers every now and then wont kill me but she won't beleive me....Now I gotta show her these articles :P
 
I hope it's healthy because I put hot stuff pretty much on everything I eat! Is anybody here aleready put tabasco on a toast because there was no more peanut butter in the pantry? I'm still alive, no stomacs pain so I rest my case your honnor!
 
I don't know if anyone read the article in the link I posted but the important part is this:
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Capsaicin and Prostate Cancer


It has been reported that capsaicin down-regulates the expression of not only prostate-specific antigen (PSA), but also androgenic receptors, the steroid-activated proteins that control expression of specific growth-related genes.

The American Association for Cancer Research reports that capsaicin is able to kill prostate cancer cells by causing them to undergo apoptosis. Capsaicin inhibited the activity of NF-kappa beta, a molecular mechanism that participates in the pathways leading to apoptosis in many cell types. Capsaicin also affected the tumors formed by human prostate cancer cell cultures grown in mouse models; results showed that treated tumors were about one-fifth the size of untreated tumors.[sup]4[/sup]

Promoter assays also showed that capsaicin inhibited the ability of dihydrotestosterone to activate the PSA enhancer, even in the presence of exogenous androgenic receptors (ARs) in LNCaP cells. This suggests that capsaicin inhibited the transcription of PSA not only via down-regulation of AR expression, but also by a direct inhibitory effect.
Although capsaicin reduced the amount of AR that the tumor cells produced, it did not interfere with normal movement of AR into the nucleus of the cancer cells, where the steroid receptor acts to regulate androgen target genes.
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If this isn't enough to make you want to eat a lot of hot stuff, I don't know what is....anything I can do to even think I am preventing prostate cancer, I am dang sure gonna do it....and before anyone asks, I think to keep the capsaicin level high enough in your system, you should eat several habanero pods (or the equivalent in powder/puree) each week...
 
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