eLi5: Why does drinking milk help after eating spicy food?
In: 13
If you look at chili pepper the hot taste is from Capsaicin. Capsaicin do not get dissolved in cold water but it is solvable in fat.
Milk contains fat, water, and most other drinks do not, and as a result. So milk is better in removing the Capsaicin.
Other things with fat are alos effective so a piece of bread with a lot of butter is, in my opinion, a lot more effective than milk in removing the spicy taste.
The chemical that you sense as spicy is called capsaicin. It’s a fat soluble compound, basically a type of oil that coats your mouth. You can’t wash away oil with water as water and oil don’t mix. You need something attracted to oil that can bind to it better than it binds to your mouth which is what the fats in milk does.
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