Spicy Food = Longer Life
 

No doubt everyone's seen this story, or some variant:

Hot Finding: Spicy Food Linked with Longer Life

http://i.livescience.com/images/i/00...ers-150804.jpg

I was surprised to search and not find a thread here on this topic. My question is: what kind of spices?? Can you just put red cayenne pepper sauce on everything and enjoy the goodness? Because I'm down with that..

So is it all chili peppers then? I'm seriously curious, since I love spicy food and I love life. I'm totally down with mixing them together :)

Or is it that people who have less sensitivity to spiciness tend to eat a better diet because certain healthy foods don't taste as bad ot them as they do to people who are more sensitive to spiciness?

LOL, I printed out that article and give it to Mrs. 9Benua so I got some breaks for adding chilly sauce to her cooking everytime :p.

Or because spicy/citrus things kill pathogens, as with ceviche.

I'm adding cayenne pepper sauce to everything, but it's mostly because I like cayenne peppers. Hope it's beneficial...

I lived in Thailand for 4 years and all your food is spicy and they seem to live longer than people back home

Correlation /= causation...

the problem with the conclusion is that there are too many confounders.

in many parts of the world, including china, spiciness correlates strongly with indigenous food, which in turn correlates with rural or poor populations. which means there is less obesity, fewer deaths by accidents, and less exposure to health risks associated with urban areas (air pollution, greater exposure to disease, etc.).

also, most processed, commoditized, and fast foods tend to be high in fats, salt, sugar, and other potentially risky additives. they also tend not to be spicy. so if you are eating spicy foods, you are probably not eating processed foods. so it could be less about the spicy food, but about the foods that people who live longer are not eating.

these should be the first things to come to the researchers' minds, not that chile is inherently beneficial or "a marker for other beneficial but unmeasured dietary components."

it's kind of like the finding that people who casually drink alcohol have a significantly higher risk of lung cancer. it has nothing to do with the alcohol; such drinkers tend to hang out in bars, where they are exposed to second-hand smoke.

I love articles like this, because they help confirm that I live a healthy lifestyle. I drink plenty of alcohol and coffee, and eat plenty of spicy foods. These consumption habits have often been linked to good health.

As for the articles that link alcohol and coffee consumption (and for all I know spicy foods) with premature death due to cancers, heart disease or other factors, they're clearly erroneous, and therefore I ignore them.

Yes, but in this case, why chance it?

:D

IMO, spicy foods must confer some sort of health benefit or we wouldn't choke them down, much less crave them.

Yeah, like heroin. ;)

Yeah, I do need some spicy food once in a while. Maybe it is cultural. Well, I like the way spice adds plenty of flavour to the food, without the calories.

On a recent trip to the Netherlands, they served chunky fries with mayonnaise - that was lethal.

For a few years now, pretty much whenever I'm eating something remotely savory, I'll get something spicy to go with it. Indonesian and Korean grocers are common go-tos.

Or does the spiciness depress your appetite so you don't eat as much? I could swear I sweated off about 5 pounds when I was in Sichuan, China for a week. That food is crazy spicy!