As a die hard fan of curry I must admit that when I saw this open access article in the British Medical Journal it made my mouth water. Researchers in China have conducted an observational study which shows an inverse correlation between the consumption of spicy foods and mortality. People who ate spicy food on at least 6 days per week were found to be 14% less likely to die than those who ate it once or less per week.
They followed half a million people for 7 years and found specifically that those with a taste for spicy foods were less likely to die from cancer, ischemic heart disease and respiratory diseases; the effect was seen in both men and women.
As this is purely an observational study it is not possible to say that there is a cause and effect relationship at work here, indeed the authors were at pains to point this out. They did, however, control for age, education, sex, BMI, and everything else their data set allowed them to. They weren't fully able to control for socioeconomic status and this could certainly have an effect as, sadly, one of the strongest predictors of your health and wellbeing is the size of your bank balance. They also mentioned the possibility of reverse causality; perhaps people who are very ill and close to death avoid spicy foods.
So, no smoking gun, but there is a growing body of papers like these that show various protective benefits associated with the consumption of spicy food and it would appear to merit some more functional studies to try and isolate potential mechanisms. In the meantime, pass the poppadoms.
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| Image used with permission |
