Naga--My Favorite Painkiller

TASTELESS, colorless, odorless and painful, pure capsaicin is a curious substance. It does no lasting damage, but the body’s natural response to even a modest dose (such as that found in a chili pepper) is self-defense: sweat pours, the pulse quickens, the tongue flinches, tears may roll. But then something else kicks in: pain relief. The bloodstream floods with endorphins—the closest thing to morphine that the body produces. The result is a high. And the more capsaicin you ingest, the bigger and better it gets.

Which is why the diet in the rich world is heating up. Hot chilies, once the preserve of aficionados with exotic tastes for cuisine from places such as India, Thailand or Mexico, are now a staple ingredient in everything from ready meals to cocktails.

Naga: Inhaling its vapor makes your nose tingle. Touching it is painful; cooks are advised to wear gloves before handling it. By the standards of other chilies, it is astronomically hot. On the commonly used Scoville scale (based on dilution in sugar syrup to the point that the capsaicin becomes no longer noticeable to the taster) it rates 1.6m units, close to the 2m score of pepper spray used in riot control.

The pepper that previously counted as the world’s hottest, the Bhut Jolokia grown by the Chile Pepper Institute at the New Mexico State University, scored just over 1m. That in turn displaced a chili grown by the Indian Defense Research Laboratory in Tezpur, which scored a mere 855,000. The hottest habanero chilies score a wimpy 577,000.

Adrenalin plus natural opiates form an unbeatable combination
The reason may be that capsaicin excites the trigeminal nerve, increasing the body’s receptiveness to the flavor of other foods. Indeed, capsaicin has useful medical effects. By disabling a part of the nervous system called “transient receptor potential vanilloid 1” it can stop the body registering the pain caused by rheumatoid arthritis, for example. It can also be used to help patients with multiple sclerosis, amputees, and people undergoing chemotherapy.

With rather less scientific evidence, a capsaicin product is marketed as an alternative to Botox, a wrinkle-smoothing cosmetic treatment. But does it do any harm? The use of pepper spray as a weapon, and chili powder as a means of torture, suggests that it must. Certainly capsaicin can be painful, causing stress: in itself a potential health risk. A big dose incapacitates. But as far as permanent physical damage is concerned, the evidence is negligible to non-existent.

That seems to contradict common sense, which suggests that hot food causes an upset stomach—or what medical specialists call “gastric mucosal injury”. A study in 1987 on the effects of ordinary pepper produced some signs of gastric exfoliation (stripping away the stomach lining) and some bleeding—though the effects were less than those produced by aspirin.

An alarming-sounding experiment a year later involved volunteers being fed minced jalapeño peppers through a tube, directly into the stomach. The results, observed by an endoscope (a camera on a tube) revealed no damage to the mucous membrane. Against that is a study of heavy chili-eaters in Mexico City, who appeared to have higher stomach cancer rates than a control group. But the rate of illness had no correlation with the frequency of chilies eaten, leading to speculation that other factors may be at work.


Humans are the only mammals to eat chilies. Other species apparently reckon that nasty tastes are a powerful evolutionary signal that something may be poisonous. A psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania (one of the world’s best-known authorities on the effects of capsaicin) has had no success in persuading rats to eat chilies, and very limited success with dogs and chimpanzees: the handful of cases where these animals did eat chilies seemed to be because of their strong relationships with human handlers.


This offers a clue to the way in which mankind comes to develop a chili eating habit. In the same way as young people may come to like alcohol, tobacco and coffee (all of which initially taste nasty, but deliver a pleasurable chemical kick), chili-eating normally starts off as a social habit, bolstered by what's called “benign masochism”: doing something painful and seemingly dangerous, in the knowledge that it won’t do any permanent harm.

The adrenalin kick plus the natural opiates form an unbeatable combination for thrill-seekers. Just don’t get it in your eyes.