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!

Check this out:  We Pioneered a Technology to Save Millions of Poor Children, But a Worldwide Smear Campaign Has Blocked It.  Read that as:  “A bunch of well-meaning but ill-informed knuckleheads are responsible for the deaths of thousands of children.”  Excerpt:

Food: everybody needs it, and many are fortunate enough to have enough, even too much of it. Food is a highly emotional subject on every continent and in every culture. For a healthy life our food has to provide energy, as well as, in very small amounts, minerals and vitamins. A varied diet, easily achieved and common in industrialised countries, provides everything. 

But poor people in countries where rice is grown often eat little else. White rice only provides energy: no minerals or vitamins. And the lack of one of the vitamins, vitamin A, is responsible for killing around 4,500 poor children every day. Lack of vitamin A is the biggest killer of children, and also the main cause of irreversible childhood blindness. 

Our project is about fixing this one dietary deficiency – vitamin A – in this one crop – rice – for this one group of people.  It is a huge group though: half of the world’s population live by eating a lot of rice every day. Two of us (PB & IP) figured out how to make rice produce a source of vitamin A, and the rice becomes a golden color instead of white. The source is beta-carotene, which the human body converts to vitamin A. Beta-carotene is what makes carrots orange. Our rice is called “Golden Rice.”

Here’s the frustrating bit:

The anti-GMO crop campaigns, and especially anti-Golden Rice campaigns, have been extraordinarily effective. If so much regulation by governments is required, surely there must be something to be suspicious about: ‘There is no smoke without fire’. The suspicion pervades research institutions and universities, the publishers of scientific journals and The World Health Organisation, and UNICEF: even the most scientifically literate are fearful of entanglement in activist-stoked public controversy.

The equivalent of 13 jumbo jets full of children crashes into the ground every day and kills them all, because of VAD. Yet the solution of Golden Rice, developed by national scientists in the counties where (Vitamin A deficiency) VAD is endemic, is ignored because of fear of controversy, and because poor children’s deaths can be ignored without controversy.

The entire anti-GMO hysteria is as one with anti-vaxxers and chemtrails kooks – it has no basis in fact.

The fact is, humans have been genetically modifying food crops for thousands of years; only the techniques have changed, from selective breeding and hybridization to direct genetic editing.  The fact is, golden rice has been proven safe.  The fact is, thousands would lead better-fed, healthier and happier lives if the idiot anti-GMO nuts in the WHO and UNICEF would just back the hell off.

But hey.  These are just poor brown people, right?  Isn’t that the argument the left uses to make proponents of free markets look heartless?  You know, the kind of free market economies that develop innovative products like golden rice?