Spice of life: regular consumption of chillies lowers death risk

Consumption of spicy food was also linked with a lower risk of death due to cancer, ischemic heart diseases and respiratory diseases in both the sexes, while in women, it corresponded with a reduced risk of death from infections.

Recent research suggests those who eat spicy food three times a week cut their risk of dying by 14 per cent.

“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.

They undertook a prospective study of 487,375 participants, aged 30-79 years, from the China Kadoorie Biobank.

Moreover, volunteers who indulged in spicy meals once or twice a week were 10 percent less likely to die during the study time-frame. And those who ate spicy foods 3 to 5 and 6 or 7 days a week were at a 14% reduced risk of death (hazard ratios for death 0.86, and 0.86 respectively).*.

“Some of the bioactive ingredients are likely to drive this association”, the authors explained, adding that fresh chilli is richer in capsaicin, vitamin C and other nutrients.

What Dr. Qi and his team found was that the more frequently someone ate spicy food, the less likely they were to die over the course of the study. But the researchers noted that they did not include people in the analysis if they had cancer, heart disease or a history of stroke at the start of the study.

Still, he pointed to prior animal research, which he said suggested that components found in fresh spices help to improve cholesterol levels, maintain healthy bacterial content in the intestine, control inflammation and reduce oxidative stress. The researchers then combined the answers with the death records to find any relation between the consumption of spices by a person and the cause of their death.

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. “Spices have been used for years in traditional medicine practices to cure or treat a variety of ailments”.

In an accompanying editorial, Nita Forouhi from the University of Cambridge called for more studies to test whether spicy foods have a direct impact on health.

“Maybe this is something in the way spices are used in Chinese cooking, or [it is] related to other things people eat or drink with the spicy food”.

However, she said that the current findings should stimulate “dialogue, debate, and further interest in research”.