Hot News About Eating Chile Peppers

What makes barbecue sauce hot? Chile pepper. And what makes chile pepper hot? A substance called capsaicin which is found mostly in the “veins” that hold the seeds in a pepper pod. Because of this, recipes warn to remove the seeds from a pepper if you don’t want a dish to be hot, but what they really mean is that you should remove the veins--the seeds themselves don’t contain any capsaicin at all.

Now, why does this stuff cause that burning sensation? That we don’t really know. It’s apparently just the sort of chemical that triggers an alarm from our nociceptors, special chemical-sensitive nerve cells found in our skin and in the lining of our mouths.

However, unlike a lot of other things that cause burning, capsaicin is pretty harmless. It’s just about the only substance that can make the skin redden but will never, even in absurdly high concentrations, raise a blister. You may feel as if you’ve poisoned yourself after a heavy dose of hot sauce, but it would take a huge amount to do the job. The average adult would have to swallow at least a quart-and-a-half of Tabasco at one sitting to commit pepper suicide. Incidentally, the official cause of death would be respiratory failure--you’d be panting so hard you could never catch a breath.

But nobody is really grateful for all this harmlessness. Everybody is looking for The Cure. Well, sorry. Technically, there is no cure for taking too much hot pepper. One momentary contact with capsaicin will make your nerves send a fire alarm to the brain for about six minutes, even if you’re washing your mouth out with streaming ice-water the whole time. So-called “cures,” like chewing bread or putting salt on your tongue or gargling root beer, can’t actually stop the pain messages, no matter what anybody says, though they may give you something to do and thereby take your mind off your troubles.

The only real cure is time. And of course continuing to eat peppers. Gradually--both during a meal and over a lifetime--your sensitivity to the pain decreases. Some fools even learn to like it.