When we eat something spicy, why does sucking in air through the mouth temporarily subsides the hotness while blowing out makes it much worse?

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When we eat something spicy, why does sucking in air through the mouth temporarily subsides the hotness while blowing out makes it much worse?

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3 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

So the other answers are both almost right.

A) spicy foods don’t technically activate your heat sensors but what they do is reduce the barrier for them to fire. So basically your body temperature is enough to make it feel like you’re burning.

B) you are warmer than your surroundings, so when you breath in, the air going past your tongue is taking net thermal energy from the tounge and into you. But when you breath out the air is basically the temperature of your core where it has just been, so if anything you’re transferring heat from your body via the air to your tounge.

So, story time. I once cooked with Trinidad moruga scorpion chillies, which were, at the time, the hottest in the world.

I washed my hands 3 times.

I went to the toilet. I touched my dick. It burned. I laughed at my folly. Then it got very bad. OK, best wash it off…..

Essentially this made me spread it all over my cock and balls. I was on fire. So I get in the shower. Now the relevant bit. The water had to be COLD, because even tepid water felt like I was pouring boiling water on my junk. This is because anything warmer than cold would be keeping my junk above this barrier to firing the heat sensors

My partner got me a mug of milk and I bathed my boys in it. But honestly it didn’t really help. Fuck me. That was a wild day.

Anonymous 0 Comments

The chemicals in spicy food (piperin in pepper, capsaicin in chillies) tricks your body into thinking you’ve received a burn as it activates the burn receptors on your tongue.

When you’re actually burnt, you want to cool down the burnt area, not heat it up. Breathing in soothes the area since the ambient air is cooler than your skin, breathing out doesn’t since the air in your lungs has been heated by your body.

Anonymous 0 Comments

I would imagine it has something to do with the breath coming out of you being heated to your internal temperature, where the air outside of you that you take in is an ambient temperature, which is likely cooler than your core temperature.