Eating spicy food may help you live longer

A study which analysed the food habits and health details of almost half a million Chinese people found that those who consumed spicy food six or seven days a week had a 14 per cent reduced risk of dying compared with those who ate it less than once a week.

Spicy foods are also associated with a lower risk of heart disease and respiratory diseases.

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

Further analysis showed those who consumed fresh, as opposed to dry, chilli tended to have a lower risk of death from cancer, ischaemic heart disease and diabetes. About 20,240 deaths were found during a median follow up.

Eating spicy food has been linked to living longer. In particular, capsaicin – the ingredient that gives chili peppers their bite – has been shown to fight inflammation, high blood pressure, obesity and cancer, among other ills.

Lu Qi, MD, PhD, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston, and colleagues conducted dietary and health history surveys among 199,293 men and 288,082 women from 10 different regions in China.

“The relationship between eating spicy food and a lower death rate was apparent really only in people who didn’t drink alcohol at all”, he said.

But talking about the influence of spicy food in prolonging healthy life, an worldwide team of researchers analyzed 487,375 participants between the age of 30-79 years.

Flickr/dualdPeople who ate spicy food three to seven times a week reduced their death risk by nearly 15%.

However, the study authors cautioned that their investigation was not able to draw a direct cause-and-effect link between the consumption of spicy foods and lower mortality. If their findings are confirmed, they said, it could lead to updated dietary recommendations and development of herbal supplements.

Capsaicin offers a plethora of other benefits including …

It’s important to remember there’s no one “magic” food – there may be several, and several ways to eat them!

So before you make a run for the hot sauce, more research is needed to qualify what spicy entails and the various ingredients, which the current study does not break down.