Long-Held Theory About Spicy Food, Debunked

A new study, published in the journal Nature Human Behavior has suggested that countries in hotter climates feature more spicy food is not because of a stomach-lead adaptation to our natural environment. In other words, the frequently used spices in these countries don’t serve as a medicine against food-borne illnesses. The study debunks the Darwinian Gastronomy theory, the theory that food scientists have held on for years:

Using this theory, it seems obvious that hot countries with higher levels of foodborne illness must be warding off illness with all the extra spices they add in comparison to cooler countries who tend to use fewer spices.

But Lindell Bromham, the study's first author and professor of ecology and evolution at the Australian National University, argues this theory simply doesn't hold up when you expand the datasets you're looking at.

"The theory is that spicy foods helped people survive in hot climates where the risk of infection from food can have a big cost in terms of health and survival," Bromham explained in a statement. "But we found that this theory doesn't hold up.

"Spicier food is found in hotter countries, but our analysis provides no clear reason to believe that this is primarily a cultural adaptation to reducing infection risk from food."

they found that the road accident prevalence was a better predictor of spice use than the prevalence of foodborne illnesses — an explanation Bromham points out as being unlikely.

"This doesn't mean that spicy food shortens your life span or makes you crash your car," explains Bromham. "Instead, there are many socioeconomic indicators that all scale together, and many of them also scale with spice use."