01.11.2017 · 👁 2,011
Scientists have discovered another positive property of spicy food
“Our colleagues recently discovered that small amounts of capsaicin, the hot substance in peppers, enhance the taste of salt. We tested whether this effect influences how much salt a person consumes,” says Zhiming Zhu from the Third Military Medical University of China in Chongqing.
Spicy food has long been considered useless and even harmful to the health of the stomach and other digestive organs, but in recent years scientists have discovered that red pepper and many other spices have a lot of advantages. For example, two years ago, biologists found that spicy foods cause fat tissue to burn rather than store extra calories, speed up metabolism and reduce the overall level of inflammation in the body.
Zhu and his colleagues uncovered another benefit of spicy food by monitoring the diets of about six hundred volunteers who agreed to eat very spicy food for a period of time at the request of scientists.
These observations led to two interesting and related results. Firstly, it turned out that eating spicy food lowered the pressure in the blood vessels by 8 and 5 millimeters of mercury. This was due to the fact that the volunteers began to eat noticeably less salt while they ate spicy foods.
Why does hot pepper enhance the taste of salt? As scientists explain, this is due to the fact that the salty and spicy taste centers in our brain are located next to each other, and they partially overlap each other. Thanks to this, the “switching on” of the pungent taste center enhances the work of the cells responsible for recognizing saltiness, making food seem saltier than it actually is.
Chinese cuisine, as Zhu admits, is one of the most spicy in the world, and it is not yet clear whether people from Europe or the United States will behave similarly. In the near future, scientists plan to conduct additional research, which they hope will answer this question.