Spicy is perceived by the same receptors as the feelings hot and/or pain. But is this just some “trickery” of the receptors or does spicy food do actual damage? And if it doesn’t do actual damage: Why do people sometimes still throw up because of it (if it was too much)?
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Remember ski ball? When you get the ball in different holes you get different amounts of points. So think of flavor molecules a bit like that, your tongue has thousands of ski ball holes and different holes can accept different balls. Sometimes a molecule will not go into the hole but do something else, capsaicin irritates the hole and changes it’s shape.
Think of a computer. Your brain accepts signals and interprets them, sometimes when the input isn’t what it expected it will pop out an error code. Your brain becomes confused because it expected a sweet or sour input and instead got ‘not working correct’ which requires it to output ‘do not consume’ but people are crazy and got a taste for ‘do not consume’ and proceeded to consume.
Think about a bubble bath. When you look close at the foam you see it is made up of many small balls, bubbles. You are made of similar balls except the outside of the balls is stronger so you usually don’t pop. When Capsaicin hits your skin cells they start too pop. The higher the concentration the faster the bubbles pop so ultra high concentration peppers will pop a bunch of cells all at once. When your stomach acid becomes diluted with capsaicin it is able to get everywhere your stomach acid can, mostly up your throat so if you eat many peppers it can alter your stomach acid and when your Brain tries to regulate it you get popped bubbles all the way up.
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