Spicy Food Less Irritating Than Aspirin, Study Finds

Spicy, pepper-laden Mexican food and fiery pepperoni pizzas may wake up the palate and bring on tears, but they do not irritate the stomach as much as aspirin does, doctors say.

Three researchers at the Veterans Administration Medical Center and Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, in the heart of spicy food country, reported the finding after peering into the stomachs of 12 volunteers.

“We thought we would find spicy food irritates the stomach, but it didn’t,” said Antone Opekun, a physician’s assistant in medicine at Baylor, who co-wrote the report. “Now we can definitively say, you can eat what you want, but if it hurts, don’t eat it.

“Eating spicy food does not cause ulcers or affect their healing,” Opekun said, noting that the findings could spell the end of bland diets prescribed for ulcer patients.

Test Meals Differed

The eight men and four women in the study ate each of four different test meals the day before doctors inspected the lining of their stomachs with a videoendoscope, a tiny video camera about as wide as a pencil eraser.

The four meals included a bland repast of steak and french fries; the bland meal plus six aspirin tablets; a pepperoni pizza, and a northern Mexican or “Tex-Mex” meal of beef enchiladas, pinto beans and rice with tomato sauce. The Mexican meal was laced with extra jalapeno peppers and accompanied by lettuce with a large dollop of picante sauce.

“The jalapenos were hot,” said one of the volunteers, “but they didn’t bother my stomach.” The volunteer, who said she moved to Texas from New Jersey, does not usually eat the spicy Southwestern cuisine.

The researchers inspected the volunteers’ stomachs the day before the tests to be sure that there was no initial damage, then checked again the day after the test meals. After the aspirin-laced meals, 11 of the 12 volunteers showed small pits in the mucosa or protective lining of the stomach. But after the spicy meals and the bland meals without aspirin, there was virtually no damage.

Consumption Rising

Writing in the Journal of the American Medical Assn., the researchers said, “The consumption of peppers is in the range of 6 million metric tons annually and rising.”

Capsaicin, the chemical that gives chili peppers their zing, is also found in 200 other varieties of peppers. Dr. David Graham, chief of gastroenterology at the Texas hospital, who led the study, said capsaicin also puts the fire in curries, paprika and Szechuan peppers.

Opekun said spicy food was not the researchers’ main area of study, but because patients with stomach problems were constantly asking, “Doc, can I eat my favorite hot dog with chili?” or other hot food, they decided to seek a definitive answer, expecting to find hot foods could aggravate common ulcer disease, for example.

Graham said the study also supported other studies showing that taking aspirin with meals does not reduce the stomach damage. But he noted, “People take aspirin every day,” and called the mucosal problems caused by the tablets trivial for most people.

Personally, he added, he had long been a Mexican food aficionado. “I’d eat it every day if I could. But then, I take aspirin, too,” he said.