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Chili Peppers Don’t Stop Heart Attacks
Why spicy food is delicious, but probably not life-saving
We all want to believe that food is medicine. It just sounds so appealing — imagine if you could cure scary diseases by changing your diet just a bit! Instead of dieting to avoid diabetes, what if you could eat a tad more chili, a handful of blueberries, and drink a kale smoothie once a week?
It’s almost certainly not true, of course, but it’s just plausible enough to sound reasonable.
This week was no different. Headlines everywhere have been joyously crying out that chili peppers are not just an important ingredient in kimchi. No, according to news sources across the world, chilies can stop heart attacks and even save your life!
It sounds like a slam-dunk for the food-is-medicine idea. Unfortunately, the reality isn’t nearly as simple as that. We might want to believe that a good curry can save your life, but the science doesn’t really show that at all.
Chili peppers probably don’t stop heart attacks.
Saucy Science
The study that has everyone declaring the wondrous healthiness of haboneros was a long-term cohort study looking at about 20,000 Italian people. Basically, the scientists asked a bunch of people questions about what they ate and how they lived, then tracked their health for about a decade. At the end of this period, they found that those who ate more chili peppers had a lower risk of death, in particular death from heart disease, than those who ate very few chilies. In relative terms, chilies appeared to reduce the risk of death by about 25%, which sounds pretty impressive for a seasoning.
Like most epidemiological trials of this kind, the scientists controlled for a range of factors that might be causing both death and chili consumption. It was a large sample, with long-term follow up, and in many ways ticks all the boxes for what…
