6 replies to this topic

[ironfistx]

I see capcaicin supplements that say they have 500mg in them or whatever, but how does that compare to eating hot peppers, because I Have not seen that mentioned there.

[holdout]

Depends what the supplement is made from and if it's an extract or how it's processed, etc.  Typically each food has a different concentration of capsaicin and therefore yield different amounts of HU (heat units) per milligram.  For example one supplement I just found online says it's from cayenne at 600 mg per pill yielding 40,000 HU.  Well one cayenne pepper weighs pretty much 5 grams -- take out all the water and you'd get about 600 mg I suppose, but this is just an example.  Now searching on Wikipedia for "Scoville Scale" you can see in the chart that cayenne pepper is listed at the 30,000 to 50,000 HU range so that's right on par.  You would have to do some conversions for hot peppers (banana peppers) listed at 100 to 900 HU.  For this example product I just mentioned (based on cayenne peppers) 40000 HU average/500 HU average = 80 whole banana peppers per pill.

 

 

[maxwatt]

I am growing some 'ghost peppers' -Jute Jolakia --  which are about 1,500,000 on the Scoville Scale. Not bragging, there are hotter peppers available.

Pure capsaicin is about 16 million Scoville units.  If the capsules contain 500 mg of capsaicin (it probably doesn't), then converting for a particular pepper of known hotness is a matter of math.

 

 

[hav]

Naga Bhut Jolakia is my favorite.  Sill living off the great crop I harvested from only 6 plants out in IL a few years ago.  Its not only exceptionally hot in typical amounts but so super rich in flavor that in small amounts it appeals to folks that don't normally go for the hot stuff.

 

Regarding the 500 mg capsules, you really need to find out either the true capsaicin content or the actual kind of pepper they ground up an put in there. Its unlikely to be pure capsaicin which I understand is a white powder. More likely they dried and ground it in whole herb form in which case it would look brown or red. You might get a clue by opening one up and tasting a grain or two.  I'd guess if its a 500 mg capsule that they'd have to be using something fairly mild and inexpensive like Cayenne or Serrano in the 20k to 40k Scoville unit range.

 

Howard

 

Edited by hav, 17 July 2014 - 04:42 PM.

[Darryl]

The Guardian (5 August 2015): Frequent spicy meals linked to human longevity

Researchers examining the diets of almost 500,000 people in China over seven years recorded that those who ate spicy foods one or two days a week had a 10% reduced risk of death compared with those who ate such meals less than once a week. The risk was 14% lower for those who ate spicy food between three and seven days a week.

 

 

 

The study and an accompanying editorial are open access:

 

Jun Lv et al. 2015 Consumption of spicy foods and total and cause specific mortality: population based cohort study. BMJ; 351 doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmj.h3942

Participants: 199,293 men and 288,082 women aged 30 to 79 years at baseline after excluding participants with cancer, heart disease, and stroke at baseline.

 

During 3,500,004 person years of follow-up between 2004 and 2013 (median 7.2 years), a total of 11,820 men and 8404 women died. Absolute mortality rates according to spicy food consumption categories were 6.1, 4.4, 4.3, and 5.8 deaths per 1000 person years for participants who ate spicy foods less than once a week, 1 or 2, 3 to 5, and 6 or 7 days a week, respectively. Spicy food consumption showed highly consistent inverse associations with total mortality among both men and women after adjustment for other known or potential risk factors. In the whole cohort, compared with those who ate spicy foods less than once a week, the adjusted hazard ratios for death were 0.90 (95% confidence interval 0.84 to 0.96), 0.86 (0.80 to 0.92), and 0.86 (0.82 to 0.90) for those who ate spicy food 1 or 2, 3 to 5, and 6 or 7 days a week, respectively. Compared with those who ate spicy foods less than once a week, those who consumed spicy foods 6 or 7 days a week showed a 14% relative risk reduction in total mortality. The inverse association between spicy food consumption and total mortality was stronger in those who did not consume alcohol than those who did (P=0.033 for interaction). Inverse associations were also observed for deaths due to cancer, ischemic heart diseases, and respiratory diseases.

 

TRPV-1 channel activation has a lot of downstream benefits, some discussed here:

 

McCarty MF et al. 2015. Capsaicin may have important potential for promoting vascular and metabolic health. Open heart, 2(1), e000262.

 

I strongly suspect uncoupling protein expression will prove the most important for longevity, as we already know other mammals with naturally higher uncoupled respiration live longer.

 

Speakman JR et al. 2004. Uncoupled and surviving: individual mice with high metabolism have greater mitochondrial uncoupling and live longer. Aging cell, 3(3), 87-95.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[kurdishfella]

Also if your a female you need higher dose since women can handle spicy it better due to having better immune system and brain hormones and neurotransmitters etc

Edited by kurdishfella, 24 April 2022 - 06:09 AM.

[kurdishfella]

Up to a certain point i dont think the mouth can feel the spiciness. So it is wrong to say its 300 more hot than a jalapeno or however you say it. It contains more but that doesn't necessarily make it hotter. A better measure would be how long the extreme spiciness last compared to other things.