My wife can swear that her mouth is on fire after eating certain foods, but when I try the same exact food I often barely detect the heat she’s talking about.
I wasn’t always like this, it was an acquired taste. Sweet chilli used to be hot to me, now I dabble with habanero, naga, etc so I know something has changed physiologically…what was it?
In: 433
While your body typically doesn’t like pain, your body tends to love when you narrowly survive pain. That’s good: you survived. Your brain releases a bunch of chemicals that reinforce that behavior.
Spicy stuff scratches that itch in a controlled manner. Your brain gets a kick out of it, so it pushes you to try it again. I find it funny: A lot of people think they’re “super strong manly men” for being tolerant to spice. In reality, all that means is that they’re masochists XD
There’s also something more basic: Desensitization. After a while, your brain starts to turn off some TRPV1 receptors (the “spice detectors” on your tongue). This means it takes more spice to notice something as hot.
Spicy foods act off a chemical called capsaicin. Don’t need to know what it is, just that it is a natural chemical peppers have developed to creat an irritant to prevent animals from nibbling.
This irritant isn’t actually harmful, it absorbs into mucus membranes, mouth, nose, eyes, throat, to enflame and send messages of heat and burning to the brain. Through will power you can power through spicy foods. The pain again is just the brain freaking out to the precieved threat.
Over time, your knee jerk reaction to spicy foods becomes dulled. The brain recognizes that the spice isn’t actually poison or some other threat and turns down the alarms.
This Is also why different foods like hot peppers register spice differently than horseradish/ Wasabi/ ginger. While the brain gets use to capsaicin, the triggering chemical found in ground mustards, Wasabi, horseradish, and ginger hits differently and but is still precived as spicy
Taste buds change and you lose some bitter ones over time. Thats why beer and vegetables are reprehensible to children and tasty when you’re older. The evolutionary reason is that children are more sensitive to things that can be poisons (bitter) and older animals are less able to compete for the best food, so they are enabled to try eating weirder stuff by their taste buds being more forgiving.
Food made with spices is different with food added with hotness of chillies alone.
Spices are good for digestion and flavoring of food.
Adding got chillies just fucus up digestive system and may spoil our inner lining of stomach.
>I wasn’t always like this, it was an acquired taste.
How did you acquire it? I want to be able to eat spicier food than I currently do, because I enjoy growing chili peppers, but I don’t seem to be able to increase my tolerance.
It’s kinda like that poison story (I don’t remember it very well) it was about a guy who got poisoned but didn’t die, because he’s been drinking small amounts every day, do his body became immune to it. Or at least that’s my understanding.
Latest Answers