Your instincts could be right
When I feel ill I eat spicy goods. I staved off gall bladder surgery for over a year eating nothing but Indian food . If I have a sore throat I eat something with hot peppers and what the Indians call the heating spices. If my stomach is upset it wants broth with a sprinkling of cayenne chili on top. Whether it is the mildness of green chilis or the smokiness of Anaheim chilies or the flat out nuclear pow of Scotch Bonnets or Caribbean Bird Peppers, there’s a lot of room in my life for heat.
Even foods that aren’t meant to be hot often get a pinch of peperoncino, not enough to make it hot, but to enlarge the flavors that lurk within. Vanilla ice cream, hot chocolate, scrambled eggs and omelets, corn on the cob, and the list could easily go on for pages.
Hot peppers and powders made of them can also soothe skin problems — or inflame them, so watch it. Plain old petroleum jelly with peppers added can be great stuff, but wear latex gloves while making it or applying it. Trust me. You’ll forget and hurt yourself!
I heard a decade or more ago that capsaicin contained something called substance P that was shown to affect joint pain, psoriasis, maybe Alzheimer’s and research was under way to explore why some people seemed to be able to survive high serum cholesterol with diets high in peppers. It seemed the pepper was a real power plant.
Now we have some wonderful news that I got via the BBC. A headline today read “How Spicy Foods Can Kill Cancers.” I don’t know about you, but I would much rather increase my already hefty consumption of peppers and pepper products than depend on apricot pits, which pretty much are and always were a sham.
Science is my friend, and when he comes into my kitchen we are a great bunch.
7 comments January 9th, 2007
