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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So, what happens with spicy food is that the capsaicin caused the touch receptors in your mouth to become confused and think that they sensing extreme heat. But they are not, so no damage is done. But your body responds in the same way (sweating etc)
– _”The answer hinges on the fact that spicy foods excite the receptors in the skin that normally respond to heat… …They respond to temperature extremes… …The central nervous system can be confused or fooled when these pain fibers are stimulated by a chemical, like that in chile peppers, which triggers an ambiguous neural response.”_
[Scientific American dot Com](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-is-it-that-eating-spi/)
It does irritate and inflame the mucus membranes, but the effect damage is minimal and temporary.
The capsaicin in a pepper that triggers the sensation of pain, is the same chemical compound found in Oleoresin Capsicum (OC) spray aka pepper spray.
That gives you an idea of what happens, albeit on a much more mild scale.
It takes [13 grams of capsaicin](https://www.mikeyvsfoods.com/post/understanding-the-scoville-scale-made-simple) to kill a 150lb person.
It does have some form of “taste” because you can dilute capsaicin in order to not taste it.
I remember reading somewhere that 2M on the Scoville scale is generally the upper limit before you scar your tastebuds. This was years ago so it may be debunked, but it came about when people were making all those insane hot sauces that are kept under lock and key and cost $400/bottle. They get that way by distilling the capsaicin beyond natural amounts.
If you eat spicy food in a video game, would you flash red over time?
Would a string of 1’s leave your body every second?
Would your health bar go down?
Think of it this way. You have heat sensors in your mouth, which send you “ow this is hot” signals when you put something hot in your mouth so you don’t burn yourself.
Spicy things are hackers that hack into your heat sensors and make them send “Ow this is hot” signals, but nothing is actually happening, the sensors are just reporting lies.
We dont have taste receptors for it but dont make the same easy mistake thinking there are no sensory receptors for spicy. In other words, the sense here isn’t taste but pain.
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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