Apparently eating chili peppers cuts your risk of heart disease. If that’s true, I’ll live forever. Then again they say every slice of bacon you eat takes a minute off your life; if that was true I’d have died in 1794. Excerpt:
For many years, chili has been hailed for its therapeutic properties, and now researchers have found that eating chili peppers regularly can cut the risk of death from heart disease and stroke.
Carried out in Italy, where chili is a common ingredient, the study compared the risk of death among 23,000 people, some of whom ate chili and some of whom didn’t.
Participants’ health status and eating habits were monitored over eight years, and researchers found that the risk of dying from a heart attack was 40% lower among those eating chili peppers at least four times per week.
Death from stroke was more than halved, according to results published Monday in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
“An interesting fact is that protection from mortality risk was independent of the type of diet people followed,” said study lead author Marialaura Bonaccio, an epidemiologist at the Mediterranean Neurological Institute (Neuromed).
In other words, someone can follow the healthy Mediterranean diet, someone else can eat less healthily, but for all of them chili pepper has a protective effect,” she said.
That’s good news!
I have a very high tolerance for hot foods, and I regularly test the limits of that tolerance. I make an awesome chili, although I have to tone it down some for the family; my unadulterated version is known as “Animal’s Thermonuclear Bowel-Basher Chili.” I love hot food – Mexican, Thai, Indian, you name it. Spicy food should make your head sweat.
I’ve been fortunate here; plenty of guys lose their tolerance for spicy food as they approach sixty. But while some people can be said to have cast-iron stomachs, I’ve always been even more fortunate than that; my entire alimentary canal is 316 stainless.
But to find out that hot peppers are even health-enhancing?
Bring on the habaneros!
