What’s So Hot About Chili Peppers?

Posted by Miss Cellania in Food & Drinks on March 23, 2009 at 10:48 pm


We love chili peppers, the hotter, the better! The ingredient that gives spicy peppers their heat is capsaicin, but what is the purpose of capsaicin in nature? To find the answer, ecologist Joshua Tewksbury traveled to Bolivia, home of many kinds of peppers.

“Capsaicin demonstrates the incredible elegance of evolution,” says Tewksbury. The specialized chemical deters microbes—humans harness this ability when they use chilies to preserve food—but capsaicin doesn’t deter birds from eating chili fruits and spreading seeds. “Once in a while, the complex, often conflicting demands that natural selection places on complex traits results in a truly elegant solution. This is one of those times.”

Link -via Boing Boing

(image credit: Tomás Carlo)


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10 comments to "What’s So Hot About Chili Peppers?"

  1. Christophe
    March 24th, 2009 at 12:02 am

    Thanks to the intraweb, you can find now all sort of crazy sauces that will burn all the way down : http://www.chilliworld.com/FactFile/Scoville_Scale.asp
    Some of them like Blair's are really dangerous and when he makes them he wears a kind-of-hazmat suit!

    And to know more about the Scoville unit :
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scoville_scale

  2. Alex
    March 24th, 2009 at 12:25 am

    The lab next to mine when I was a grad student studied capsaicin. They found out that receptor for pain = receptor for heat (hotness of capsaicin).

    By the way, that's how Icy Hot, tiger balm and other creams work to dull the pain: by overwhelming the pain sensors with heat.

  3. ted
    March 24th, 2009 at 6:16 am

    Very unclear post.

  4. Miss Cellania
    March 24th, 2009 at 6:28 am

    ted, it's a five-page article. I couldn't get the whole thing in a small post.

  5. Byrd Brain
    March 24th, 2009 at 11:05 am

    I thought it was pretty clear. Perhaps my brain is another example of the elegance of evolution.

  6. darena
    March 24th, 2009 at 11:42 am

    I don't think that the fact that the spice repels microbes, but the birds can eat it freely, is not an example of the elegance of revolution, but God has thought of everything. Our world was wisely created.

  7. darena
    March 24th, 2009 at 11:43 am

    I don’t think that the fact that the spice repels microbes, but the birds can eat it freely, is an example of the elegance of revolution, but God has thought of everything. Our world was wisely created.

  8. Gauldar
    March 24th, 2009 at 12:56 pm

    @darena

    ROFLLOL

  9. Frau
    March 24th, 2009 at 5:14 pm

    @ Darena - Birds can eat it because their tongues are different than mammalian tongues. They do not have the same pain receptors.

  10. Zany Holidays Blogger
    October 26th, 2009 at 3:26 pm

    No wonder chili gets its own month in October...happy National Chili Month!


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