Could regularly eating spicy foods help you live longer?

By Ariana Eunjung Cha August 5, 2015


There's probably no food quite as baffling as the chili pepper.

A bite of a habanero, jalapeño or cayenne can pack such an ouch that all logic says they should repel those who attempt to consume them. Yet for centuries humans have not only eaten such spicy foods -- but enjoyed them. In recent years, worldwide consumption of hot spices has grown dramatically, fueled by the popularity of Mexican salsas, Thai and Indian curries and the like.

Scientists seeking to better understand the alluring properties of hot foods have found evidence that we may be so drawn to them because they are good for us. While the research is still preliminary, it suggests spicy food may have all kinds of health benefits ranging from boosting metabolism and preventing gastric damage to reducing the risk of heart disease and cancer.

The newest study, published this week in The BMJ, finds a link between regular consumption of spicy foods and a lower risk of death.

As far as these types of epidemiological studies go, this one is huge. It's based on dietary data of nearly 500,000 people from China, the birthplace of all manner of spicy foods from chicken stir-fried in mounds of red peppers to mouth-numbing dumplings bathed in a red oil.

The participants, who were enrolled in 2004-2008 and followed for a mean of 7.2 years, were asked to fill out a questionnaire that included general questions about their health and diet including how often they ate spicy foods. Out of 487,375 participants, 20,224 died during the study period.

After controlling for age, gender, level of education, marital status, alcohol consumption, smoking, health history, and other variables, the researchers found an inverse relationship between eating spicy foods and risk of death. Those who ate spicy foods 1-2 times a week had a 10 percent lower risk of death than those who rarely or never ate them, and those who ate them 3-7 times a week had a 14 percent lower risk of death.


A plate of beef tacos prepared at the Taqueria el Tacorrey in Richmond with large chunks of spicy green peppers. (Timothy C. Wright for The Washington Post)
The link was similar for both men and women. Frequent consumption of spicy foods was also linked to a lower risk of death from specific conditions: cancer, ischaemic heart and respiratory system diseases.


Jun Lv, a professor in the department of epidemiology and biostatistics at Peking University; Lu Qi, an associate professor at Harvard's School of Public Health; and their co-authors also wrote that their data shows that the associations they found for those diseases seem to be stronger for those who consumed fresh chili pepper than those who consumed dried chili, sauce or oil.

The researchers said that while it isn't possible to draw any conclusions about whether eating spicy foods causes you live longer from their work that more studies are needed to look at this link in more depth. If their findings are confirmed, they said, it could lead to updated dietary recommendations and development of herbal supplements.

"Spices have been an integral part of culinary cultures around the world and have a long history of use for flavoring, coloring, and preserving food, as well as for medicinal purposes ... however, the evidence relating daily consumption of spicy foods and total and disease specific mortality from population studies is lacking," they wrote.

Lv, Qi and the other researchers suggested that capsaicin, the molecule responsible for the hot sensation in spicy foods by binding to the pain receptors in the tongue and making them feel like they are burning, may be the reason behind the link between chili peppers and longevity.

"The beneficial roles of capsaicin have been extensively reported in relation to anti-obesity, antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, anti-cancer, and anti-hypertensive effects," they wrote. They also noted that spices have been shown to have an anti-microbial function that may impact the bacteria that live in your gut in such a way that it helps increase longevity.

Korean spicy fish stew photographed in Washington, DC. Tableware from Crate and Barrel. (Deb Lindsey for The Washington Post)
In an editorial accompanying the study, Nita Forouhi, a researcher at the epidemiology unit of the University of Cambridge, said that the Chinese study has a number of strengths but that the dietary survey contained only "crudely measured" categories (red meat, fresh vegetables, fresh fruits) so it was unable to take into account other dietary habits that might have impacted the results, and that the quantity and strength of the chili consumed was also unknown.

Forouhi said that as a result the research should be "considered hypothesis generating, not definitive."

"Should people eat spicy food?" Forouhi said. "It's too early to say, but the debate and the research interest are certainly hotting up."


Shelley Alberga Dayman
8/7/2015 1:17 AM GMT+0530
Hot Peppers, are all natural...candy, is all chemical! I was raised in the Caribbean, I was raised on Scotch Bonnet peppers. They are about a 3000 on the Scoville scale on or about as hot as a Habanero, or hotter! I grow and harves these peppers, using raw in food, as a hot sauce or pepper jelly! I have a horrible family health history, My father had coronary heart disease, my mother as well, so it follows, I should as well. but, I am 63, way overweight, and I eat hot pepper 3-4 times a week. I was 430lbs, so had bariatric surgery in 2006, but before that, no doctor would touch me, unless I had a complete workup, by a cardiac surgeon! So, I did and she was surprised...not only did I have nothing even close to heart disease, she said I was in good shape, for the shape I was in!!! Yes, I have issues, adult onset diabetes. I'm working on that. My diet consists of coconut oil, in coffee every day, I use turmeric, cinnamon and ginger in all my food as well as multiple pepper concotions. I do not feel ill, I have no pain and no real issues regarding peppers! I do believe without them, this would be a very different story. Oh, I also eat curries twice a week. It holds off the onset of Alzsheimers. Also, eat very little red meat, never rare or raw, some chicken and fish.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2015/08/05/hot-topic-could-regularly-eating-spicy-foods-help-you-live-longer/?utm_term=.bba8073ffaf3

Cornell study finds some people may be genetically programmed to be vegetarians

Cornell study finds some people may be genetically programmed to be vegetarians.

Cornell University researchers have found a fascinating genetic variation that they said appears to have evolved in populations that favored vegetarian diets over hundreds of generations. The geography of the vegetarian allele is vast and includes people from India, Africa and parts of East Asia who are known to have green diets even today.

Researcher Kaixiong Ye said that the vegetarian adaptation allows people to “efficiently process omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids and convert them into compounds essential for early brain development.”

Omega-3 is found in fish, whole grains, olive oil, fruits and vegetables, while omega-6 is found in beef, pork products and many packaged snack foods such as cookies, candies, cakes and chips, as well as in nuts and vegetable oils.

Nutritionists believe that getting a good balance of these two types of fatty acids in the diet is essential to staying healthy. The body can’t produce these substances naturally, so it must get them from food.

Omega-3 is anti-inflammatory and helps regulate metabolism.

Omega-6 contributes to inflammation and plays an important role in skin and hair growth, bone health and reproductive health. Inflammatory responses are essential to our survival. They help fight off infections and protect us from injury. But if the response is excessive, it can lead to all kinds of problems and may contribute to a higher risk of heart disease, cancer and Alzheimer's disease.

Studies have suggested that humans evolved on a diet with a ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 essential fatty acids of 1:1 but that the Western diet has a ratio that is closer to 15 or 16:1. The Mediterranean diet, in contrast, is closer to having an equal balance of the two and is recommended by many doctors.

But this new study, funded by the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, shows that different people may need radically different ratios of the substances in their diet depending on their genes, and it supports the growing evidence against a one-size-fits-all approach to nutrition and for highly personalized advice.

The existence of the vegetarian allele implies that, for people with this variation, straying from that diet — by eating a lot of red meat, for example — may make them more susceptible to inflammation, because their bodies were optimized for a different mix of inputs.

The research, published Wednesday in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution, involved two parts. The scientists first analyzed the frequencies of the vegetarian allele in 234 primarily vegetarian Indians and 311 Americans living today. They found the vegetarian allele in 68 percent of the Indians and 18 percent of the Americans. Then they analyzed information from the 1,000 Genomes Project — a database of global DNA — to calculate an estimate of the frequency of the vegetarian allele in far-flung populations around the world. The differences were striking: 70 percent of South Asians, 53 percent of Africans, 29 percent of East Asians and 17 percent of Europeans had the gene variation.

Now here's where their work gets even more interesting. Ye and colleagues found a different version of that gene adapted to a marine diet, rich in seafood, among the Inuit people in Greenland. Technically speaking, it’s the “opposite” of the vegetarian allele. The vegetarian allele has an insertion of 22 “bases,” or a building block of DNA, and this insertion was deleted in the marine allele.

Ye, who is the lead co-author along with Kumar Kothapalli, a senior research associate in nutritional sciences, theorized that having the vegetarian allele “might have been detrimental” for the Inuit because of their seafood-rich diets.

The vegetarian and marine alleles appear to control the FADS1 and FADS2 enzymes in the body, which are critical to converting omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids into what the researchers called “downstream products” needed for brain development and controlling inflammation. People who eat meat and seafood need less of the FADS1 and FADS2 enzymes to get sufficient nutrition. “Their omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acid conversion process is simpler and requires fewer steps,” they noted.

Another groundbreaking study about genes and food was published in 2014 in Nature Communications. It found that a higher percentage of people in Europe — and particularly in Ireland — have variants for being lactose-tolerant, or able to break down the sugar in non-human milk.

The authors said this ability appears to have evolved from a long history of milk drinking.

Ye explained that people with this kind of gene “absorbed enough end products from milk for long-chain fatty acid metabolism so they don't have to increase capacity to synthesize those fatty acids from precursors.”

There has been considerable debate and research on when — and why — these types of variants cropped up.

In the case of lactose tolerance, early research had estimated that it arose 7,000 or more years ago, when people in the region began making cheese. But the Nature study wasn't able to find it until 3,000 years back, which may imply that the populations had to rely heavily on dairy before the adaptation occurred.

Ye said the evolution of the vegetarian allele is less clear. It doesn't exist in our ape relatives the chimpanzee or orangutan, but there is some evidence it may have been there in early hominids Neanderthal and Denisovan. It seems likely, the researchers wrote, that it has to do with migration patterns and the pressures that came with the availability or lack of availability of different kinds of foods in certain environments.

Today, in a world where many people have ready access to a wide variety of foods at their local groceries, the adaptations can act more as limitations to the kinds of foods you can eat to remain healthy.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2016/03/30/cornell-study-finds-some-people-may-be-genetically-programmed-to-be-vegetarians/?utm_term=.3703a5b6fec0

***

This indicates that it was risky for vegetarian Indians to change their diets to a highly non-vegetarian diet.

http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Vijayawada/evolutionary-advantage-is-lost-with-diet-change-study/article8412156.ece

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Original paper

https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/33/7/1726/2578764/Positive-Selection-on-a-Regulatory-Insertion

The version of ‘wheat’ we consume today is a product of genetic research

For all the high-tech gadgets on display in the Bread Lab, the operation is decidedly old-fashioned, relying on stone mills of a type that have not been used for more than a century and on a philosophy that all it takes to make genuine and delicious whole-wheat bread is time, talent, flour, a little salt, and lots of water. There are essentially two ways to turn flour into bread. The first is the way it was done for most of human history: let the flour absorb as much water as possible and give it time to ferment, a process that allows yeast and bacteria to activate the dough. Kneading then binds the two proteins that come together to form gluten. Most of the bread consumed in the United States is made the other way: in place of hydration, fermentation, and kneading, manufacturers save time by relying on artificial additives and huge industrial mixers to ram together the essential proteins that form gluten.

Until the late nineteenth century, when steel rollers and industrial mills came into use, wheat was ground on stones, a slow and imprecise process. Steel was fast, efficient, and easy to maintain, and it permitted millers to discard the germ and the bran in the wheat kernel and then rapidly process the starchy endosperm. This made white flour. Almost nobody seemed to notice, or care, that by tossing out the rest of the kernel industrial bakers were stripping bread of its vitamins, its fibre, and most of its healthy fats. White bread was seen as an affordable luxury. Like many Jews arriving from Russia at the turn of the twentieth century, my great-grandfather had never seen white bread before, but when he did he immediately made what was referred to, at least in my family, as an “American sandwich”: he took two pieces of the black bread that he had always eaten, and carefully placed a piece of industrially made white bread between them. He is said to have been delighted.

***

Some researchers argue that wheat genes have become toxic. Davis has said that bread today is nothing like the bread found on tables just fifty years ago: “What’s changed is that wheat’s adverse effects on human health have been amplified many-fold. . . .The version of ‘wheat’ we consume today is a product of genetic research. . . . You and I cannot, to any degree, obtain the forms of wheat that were grown fifty years ago, let alone one hundred, one thousand, or ten thousand years ago. . . . We have to restrict other carbohydrates beyond wheat, but wheat still stands apart as the worst of the worst.’’

***

William Davis, a cardiologist whose book “Wheat Belly” created an empire founded on the conviction that gluten is a poison, the protein has become a culinary villain. Davis believes that even “healthy” whole grains are destructive, and he has blamed gluten for everything from arthritis and asthma to multiple sclerosis and schizophrenia. David Perlmutter, a neurologist and the author of another of the gluten-free movement’s foundational texts, “Grain Brain: The Surprising Truth About Wheat, Carbs, and Sugar—Your Brain’s Silent Killers,” goes further still. Gluten sensitivity, he writes, “represents one of the greatest and most under-recognized health threats to humanity.’’

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/03/grain

FODMAPs seem more likely than gluten to cause widespread intestinal distress

My Note: The below experiments, while done thoroughly and by a reputed professor, studied the impact of gluten on health for too less a period. This is the problem with many health studies - they study the impact of any particular food for too less time period. Only over long periods will the negative effects of gluten would become more clear. This is the same problem with studying impact of casein on health. They are studies for too less a period. So, the studies below should not be taken into consideration while evaluating whether gluten has harmful effects on health or not?

Perhaps, the only way to study would be the anecdotal experience of people who have gone gluten free over a long period of time.

***

Gluten anxiety has been building for years, but it didn’t become acute until 2011, when a group led by Peter Gibson, a professor of gastroenterology at Monash University and the director of the G.I. unit at the Alfred Hospital, in Melbourne, seemed to provide evidence that gluten was capable of causing illness even in people who did not have celiac disease. Gibson and his colleagues recruited thirty-four people with irritable-bowel syndrome, all of whom had complained of stomach ailments that largely disappeared when they stopped eating gluten. He put them all on a strictly monitored gluten-free diet, but, unbeknownst to the subjects, about half got muffins and bread with gluten. It was a double-blind study, so neither the doctors nor the patients knew which muffins and bread contained gluten. But most of those who ate the gluten reported that the pain returned; for most of the others it did not. The study was small but meticulous, and the results were compelling. Several similar studies are now under way, but dietary research is notoriously time-consuming and difficult.
Gibson published his findings in the American Journal of Gastroenterology, but, along with other experts, he urged restraint in interpreting data from such a small study. Nevertheless, millions of people with vague symptoms of gastric distress suddenly found something concrete for which to blame their troubles. The market boomed, but the essential mystery remained unsolved: Why was gluten suddenly so hazardous? Perhaps, researchers thought, farmers had increased the protein (and gluten) content of wheat so drastically that people could no longer digest it properly.

But there is more to wheat than gluten. Wheat also contains a combination of complex carbohydrates, and the Australian team wondered if these could be responsible for the problems. Gibson and his colleagues devised a different study: they recruited a group of thirty-seven volunteers who seemed unable to digest gluten properly. This time, the researchers attempted to rule out the carbohydrates and confirm gluten as the culprit. Gibson put all the volunteers on a diet that was gluten-free and also free of a group of carbohydrates that he and his colleagues called fodmaps, an acronym for a series of words that few people will ever remember: fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides, and polyols. Not all carbohydrates are considered fodmaps, but many types of foods contain them, including foods that are high in fructose, like honey, apples, mangoes, and watermelon; dairy products, like milk and ice cream; and fructans, such as garlic and onions.
Most people have no trouble digesting fodmaps, but these carbohydrates are osmotic, which means that they pull water into the intestinal tract. That can cause abdominal pain, bloating, and diarrhea. When the carbohydrates enter the small intestine undigested, they move on to the colon, where bacteria begin to break them down. That process causes fermentation, and one product of fermentation is gas. In Gibson’s new study, when the subjects were placed on a diet free of both gluten and fodmaps, their gastrointestinal symptoms abated. After two weeks, all of the participants reported that they felt better. Some subjects were then secretly given food that contained gluten; the symptoms did not recur. The study provided evidence that the 2011 study was wrong—or, at least, incomplete. The cause of the symptoms seemed to be fodmaps, not gluten; no biological markers were found in the blood, feces, or urine to suggest that gluten caused any unusual metabolic response.
In fact, fodmaps seem more likely than gluten to cause widespread intestinal distress, since bacteria regularly ferment carbohydrates but ferment protein less frequently. Although a fodmap-free diet is complicated, it permits people to eliminate individual foods temporarily and then reintroduce them systematically to determine which, if any, are responsible for their stomach problems. fodmaps are not as trendy as gluten and not as easy to understand. But, biologically, their role makes more sense, Murray says.

“That first paper, in 2011, blew our minds,” Murray told me. “Essentially, it said that people are intolerant of gluten, and it was based on a well-designed, double-blind study. When people were challenged with gluten, by eating the muffins, they got sick. We just couldn’t figure it out. But then came the second study. By then, it was almost too late to put the genie back in the bottle. You have millions of people out there completely convinced that they feel better when they don’t eat gluten—and they don’t want to hear anything different.”

The fodmap research, while influential and highly regarded, involved fewer than a hundred people, not enough to account definitively for the number of people who have abandoned foods that contain gluten. Several groups are trying to repeat those results. But studies like that take time. At present, there are no blood tests, biopsies, genetic markers, or antibodies that can confirm a diagnosis of non-celiac gluten sensitivity. There have been a few studies suggesting that people without celiac disease have a reason to eliminate gluten from their diet. But most of the data are unclear or preliminary. Doctors rarely diagnose non-celiac gluten sensitivity, and many don’t believe that it exists. Few people seem to have been deterred by the lack of evidence. “Everyone is trying to figure out what is going on, but nobody in medicine, at least not in my field, thinks this adds up to anything like the number of people who say they feel better when they take gluten out of their diet,” Murray said. “It’s hard to put a number on these things, but I would have to say that at least seventy per cent of it is hype and desire. There is just nothing obviously related to gluten that is wrong with most of these people.’’

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/03/grain

Traditional alcoholic beverages from Ayurveda and their role on human health

Ayurveda have also indicated about the medicinal uses of a variety of alcoholic beverages, which are generally named as ‘Madya’. Madya are not prescribed in current practice of Ayurveda probably because of the restrictions for their inadvertent use as drinks.

Madya are of various kinds like sura, sukta, sidhu, etc. Ira, madira, hala and balavallabha are synonyms of Madya.

All kinds of Madya are hot in potency,
slightly sweet, bitter and pungent in taste,
slightly astringent, sour at the end of digestion.

It aggravates pitta, mitigates vata and kapha, causes purgation, digests quickly, creates dryness, non-viscid, kindles digestive fire, helps taste, quick in action, enters into minute pores of the body and cleaning them, spreads quickly and produces looseness of joints.

They are beneficial to those having loss of sleep or excess sleep of both lean and stout persons.

All of these properties are conferred, if they are used judiciously considering them as medicines. They cause intoxication and act like poisons if they are used otherwise.


http://www.niscair.res.in/sciencecommunication/ResearchJournals/rejour/ijtk/Fulltextsearch/2007/January%202007/IJTK-Vol%206%281%29-January%202007-pp%20144-149.htm

high dosages of vitamin B6 can lead to neurotoxicity

Vitamin B6 is often mentioned as help to be relieved from high histamine levels, due to it’s important role in the breakdown of histamine by DAO.

But I’d like to warn everybody, it is well-known that high dosages of vitamin B6 can lead to neurotoxicity, meaning that it kills of your nerves. What is less well-known is that even in lower dosages in can have detrimental effects on certain people. Which I experienced myself.  I started taking about 25 mg a day, within a view days my limbs would often get numb, just like you get a sleepy leg or arm every now and then, but this was worse. They’d fall asleep constantly whatever position I took, I started to get tired and dizzy. And before I knew it, I was laying in my bed trying to find a comfortable enough place not to be bothered by the constant tingling and sleepiness of my body, while trying to remain conscious. Didn’t really help that deadlines and exams were coming up.

Luckily for me, the effect didn’t last very long, as opposed to those people who get problems after taking high dosages  for a long time, but it was still very uncomfortable and highly disruptive of my life. During the time I was able to stay awake, I googled like crazy, trying to find out what was happening to me this time. I soon found out about the toxic effects of B6, and that it can also have nasty effects in lower dosages in certain people.  This can be due to a certain sensitivity in those people, but it can also come from a deficiency of other vitamin B’s and magnesium. Magnesium shouldn’t have been an issue, since I already supplement with magnesium. Maybe it was due to the lack of other vitamin’s, since well, I’ve stopped taking complete vitamins and complete vitamin b supplements. As these contain minerals and vitamins that can lead to a higher level of histamine and should be avoided in case of a histamine intolerance. Yes folic acid(B9), vitamin b12 and niacin(B3) I’m looking at you.

So instead I’ve started to eat more foods that contain high levels of vitamin B6, the daily dosage is only about 1 to 2 mg, and the melatonin I often take also contains a view mg, so does the energy drink I often indulge in. And yeah I know caffeine is bad, the weird chemicals in it are also bad. But I need my caffeine dose and sugar dose, and I just love to drink them. When I don’t drink too many too fast it doesn’t affect me all that much. Though coffee and green tea, which both contain caffeine can make me feel very sick.

So if you’ve started taking vitamin B6 and notice any side effects like numbness, dizziness and fatigue. Stop taking it!

https://histamino.wordpress.com/tag/vitamin-b6/

Rum - Helps keep scurvy at bay & (Rum also helps with histamine intolerance?)

Due to medicinal properties, Rum was served to British soldiers to keep scurvy at bay.

British soldiers who were low on immunity were advised 1 or 2 pegs of rum.

From Histamine & Sea sickness, the research of Austrian scientist Reinhart Jarisch, we know that Vitamin C helps reduce histamine intolerance. So, by that logic, rum must be helping with histamine intolerance.


http://www.wellordie.com/food/old-monk-is-a-great-medicine/

This article also says that rum offers protection against common cold, sore muscles, diabetes, heart disease and helps live long life.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25095772

https://www.amazon.com/Histamine-Intolerance-Seasickness-Reinhart-Jarisch/dp/3642554466