Eating Spicy Food Doesn't Mean You're Tough, says SCIENCE

No loading up your food with enough chemical heat to disperse a riot does not make you tough says who says science you're not impressing anybody the most alpha thing to do is to eat your food how you actually like it and to let other people do the same if how you actually like it is loaded up with chilies than more power to you but the most likely explanation for that particular preference is not that you're a total badass the more likely explanation is that your nervous system has simply become desensitized to these one of these can taste ten times as hot to somebody else as it does to you you're not having different reactions to the same sensation you're having different sensations before we perceive let's get our nomenclature straight when I say spicy in this context I'm not talking about spices generally I'm talking about chillies capsicum specifically a chemical inside Chili's called capsaicin dr. Nadia burns wrote her doctoral dissertation in food science all about why some people seem to like the heat more than others she says it's important to understand that capsaicin is not acting on our taste buds it's acting on a pain receptor that we have called trpv1 trippy one is actually it's a receptor that is associated in detecting and regulating our body temperature and so part of its role is to tell us when there is something that from a temperature perspective is hot enough that it could do damage to our bodies and what capsaicin does when you eat it is it lowers your mouths temperature pain threshold by about 10 degrees C 50 degrees Fahrenheit you would normally start to feel some discomfort in your mouth at about a hundred and nine degrees Fahrenheit or 43 degrees C and so by dropping it about about 10 degrees 35 C which is mouth temperature is now triggering that and sending signal to your brain that this could do damage this could be bad this is hot that's why you get temporary relief when you take a swig of cold water it's not that it's washing away the capsaicin it's actually just lowering the temperature of your mouth the second you swallow it your mouth temperature starts to go back up to normal again and you feel the burn scientists think Chili's evolved to have this chemical for a very specific purpose to discourage us mammals from eating them while encouraging birds to eat all the chilies they want why well because us mammals have molars at least some of us do so when we eat chilies we tend to grind up the seeds and by the time they pass through our system they emerge so damaged that they can't grow new chili plants birds on the other hand swallow the seeds whole so birds can help the chili plant reproduce by dispersing its seeds far and wide intact ready to grow a new plant and birds have trip v1 receptors that do not respond to capsaicin to them it's just like eating any other berry oh they're for birds are such badasses right so why would we go out of our way to eat something that a plant developed for the express purpose of repelling us well lots of plants that we use as flavorings are actually trying to keep us away garlic is another prime example the hot pungent flavor that you get from freshly chopped garlic is a chemical called allicin which the garlic only creates when it's damaged it's a defense mechanism the same chemical weapons these plants use on us also happen to kill microorganisms including many common foodborne pathogens so one theory as to why super spicy food became so much more popular in the global south is that food spoils away faster in warm climates dousing your food in garlic and chili can make it last longer and if your food does start to spoil those super strong flavors might overwhelm the gross ones and that gets it the main reason why I don't like a ton of mouth burn I want to actually taste my food and when I get a whole lot of capsaicin in my mouth I just kind of feel like my whole sensory system becomes overwhelmed and I can't taste what I'm eating Chili's don't burn off your taste buds that's a myth but one sensation absolutely can drown out the others because the sensation that capsaicin elicits is a pain response there is some selective attention that is paid to that as your brain is thinking this is something that could do harm if this is bad I have to pay attention to this and one sensation that I absolutely want my to be free to process is the delicious food that I get delivered to my door courtesy of the sponsor of this video hello fresh America's number one meal kit whom I will now take one brief moment to thank Lauren's been loving hello fresh she's got a few great recipes that she does but generally she's not super confident in the kitchen and hellofresh just takes so much of the stress out of cooking for her clear instructions pre-measured ingredients there's no going to the store and being worried that you're buying the wrong thing and it allows us to get a homemade meal on the table even in the midst of our normal weeknight chaos and hellofresh also kind of broke us out of some ruts they've got 20-plus chef curated recipes each week all familiar enough but often with one element or one ingredient that we normally wouldn't use and it's flexible if we're gonna be out of town or something we can skip a week no problem and hellofresh is now from 566 per serving and if you sign up using my offer code you'll get eight meals free that's $80 off your first month of hellofresh just go to hello fresh comm and enter my offer code Adam ragout SIA 80 that's all in the description and we were free to make those tacos as spicy as we wanted by the way it's interesting how when you eat something spicy the heat tends to kind of grow over the course of the meal you actually see over the course of a single eating experience people exhibit sensitization which means that it seems like it's just getting more and more and more and more intense but over a longer period of time you see what's called chronic desensitization and you see that people's threshold sensitivity actually goes down so you could essentially train yourself with small doses of capsaicin to lower your threshold but you'd have to be really consistent so to my Indian viewers for example the reason that you like way more Kashmir chili powder in your tandoori chicken than I do is not because you're so much tougher than me I mean you may indeed be tougher than me but that's beside this particular point the more likely explanation is that due to your country's climate your squeeee is it cuisine evolved to have more spices of all kinds in it and because you therefore grew up eating way more capsaicin than I did you have to pour on way more chilli powder than I do to get that same Pleasant mild burn that we both enjoy due to the wonderful and mysterious mingling of pain and pleasure in our brains and honestly if you're a person who simply grew up in a culinary tradition like those of India or Southeast Asia or Latin America I have no complaint with you I have a problem with dudes of a heritage a little closer to mine who right now are probably thinking yes exactly this is why my eating chilies is a reflection of my badassery I have trained my system it's an adaptation to stress just like weight training indeed 45 pounds does feel way heavier to me than it does to say 4 time mr. Olympia Jay Cutler and that is because he has subjected his muscles to way more stress thereby forcing them to adapt and get stronger and yes that does make Jay more of a badass than me but here's the thing dude making your muscles stronger actually has a point you can do something with that strength you can defeat me in battle or maybe help me move my couch but physiologically adapting yourself to capsaicin enables you to do what exactly eat lots of chilies cool trick bro now I figured that in this respect chronic capsaicin desensitization is more akin to how we adapt to light imagine if you went and stood on my front porch while I went into my bathroom drew the shades and turned off all the lights then we both stepped out onto my front lawn you'd be perfectly comfortable in the sunlight while I would be squinting and are you more of a badass than me at that moment no you're just a person with constricted pupils and I'm a person with dilated pupils our eyes are for the moment calibrated differently we're not having different reactions to the same experience we're having different experiences that said capsaicin desensitization does not fully explain why some people seem to eat way more of it than their peers do across all cultures you kind of energy anecdotally hear that there's always a few people who are pushing it and are always going higher and always going higher and always going higher and trying to understand that phenomenon was the main focus of dr. burns dissertation research at Penn State she brought in about a hundred people living in my hometown of State College Pennsylvania and she had them taste all kinds of things including precisely measured capsaicin doses the participants ranked how intense the samples tasted to them and then they filled out some questionnaires about what kinds of foods they liked and also about their personality more broadly then she went looking for correlations between certain personality types and a propensity to eat super spicy food and what she found was very different correlations between men versus women women who said they really liked the heat were more likely to exhibit a broader personality trait known as sensation-seeking which is defined as a need for novel and intense stimulation whereas the men who said they liked the heat were more likely to exhibit a trait called sensitivity to reward sensitivity to reward is a portion of a personality questionnaire there's really built to measure extrinsic rewards so it's kind of learned rewards things like money power status where sensation-seeking is a measure that really taps into a more intrinsic reward so things that there could be more of a biological like hardwiring so the women the dr. Byrnes studied were more likely to get a hit of dopamine or some other good feeling directly in response to the burn whereas the men that she studied seemed to be getting a good feeling in response to how badass they imagined that eating capsaicin made them look in the eyes of other people it's really possible that that's all to still learn dissociation and that men are kind of torturing themselves in eating these spicy foods not because they're actually enjoying it but they enjoy that social status that's coming with it and that boys is what I call weak sauce don't be that guy you know but you want to be like you want to be like the wolf Quentin Tarantino's cinematic universe is teeming with testosterone but the most Alpha of all Tarantino characters is Winston wolf from pulp fiction and what does the wolf say when somebody asks him how he wants his coffee oh you would I take it that's a cream lots of sugar that line is in the movie for a reason it's there to establish that the wolf doesn't need to impress the other boys by ordering his coffee black he's confident enough in his manhood that he can order his food and drink however the hell he damn well actually likes it that's the guy that I want to be and that is my closing argument to you quick epilogue though what's dr. burns been doing since she got her PhD well she's now the principal sensory scientist at Ocean Spray cranberries and guess what Ocean Spray has a spicy product in Mexico called enchiladas yep spicy dried cranberries hey take your pleasure however you find it any way you want that's the way you need anyway you want

Channel: Adam Ragusea

Views: 597,052

Keywords: spicy food, scoville scale, spicy foods, spicy food eating, hot food, capsaicin, capsaicin pronunciation, capsaicin pepper, hot sauce challenge🔥, spicy food challenge, spicy food recipes, scoville scale test, scoville scale peppers, spicy foods challenge🔥, food challenge, food challenge🔥, science, indian food, indian tandoori chicken recipe, kashmiri chili powder, kashmiri chili powder recipe, kashmiri chili pepper, masculinity

Id: vX8ri6fHfps

Length: 11min 50sec (710 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 08 2019