Spicy food can set your mouth on fire and cause one to sweat profusely. However, a new study suggests that regularly eating spicy food could also lower the risk of death from specific conditions.
The observational study, published in The BMJ, found people whose daily diets regularly featured spicy foods had a lower risk of death from cancer, ischemic heart disease and respiratory disease.
Many previous studies have demonstrated health benefits for spices such as red pepper, and others have demonstrated that certain bioactive agents in spices such as capsaicin can have beneficial effects in conditions such as obesity and cardiovascular disease, reports medicalnewstoday.com.
While these studies suggest that spices could play a prominent role in human health, there is currently a lack of evidence for the effects of daily spicy food consumption on disease-specific and all-cause mortality from population studies.
To address this, a research team led by researchers from the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences analyzed data obtained from the China Kadoorie Biobank - a prospective cohort study of more than half a million adults from geographically diverse regions in China.
They followed a total of 487,375 participants aged between 30 and 79 who were regularly assessed for illness. When each participant was enrolled to the study from 2004-2008, they completed a questionnaire about their health and consumption of spicy foods, red meat, vegetables and alcohol.
During the follow-up period, 5% of surviving participants were randomly surveyed again in 2008 to assess whether the baseline questionnaire results accurately reflected spicy food consumption over time. The study authors report these questionnaires indicated that spicy food consumption was reported consistently.
A total of 20,224 deaths were recorded during the follow-up period, with participants tracked for an average of 7.2 years.
Researchers observed that participants who reported eating spicy foods 3-7 days a week were 14% less likely to have died than participants who ate spicy foods less than once a week. Participants who ate spicy foods once or twice a week were at a 10% reduced risk of dying compared with participants who ate spicy foods less than once a week.
Capsaicin can be found in many over-the-counter medicines for pain relief and it is also an ingredient in many forms of pepper spray.
In terms of spicy food, researchers found that the most commonly used spices for participants who ate spicy foods weekly were fresh and dried chili peppers. Participants who regularly ate fresh chili had a reduced risk of death from cancer, ischemic heart disease and diabetes.
