In "why do people like spicy food?" "There are people who like to eat chili, just as some people like to ride on the roller coaster and watch horror movies. They are experiencing the dangers of harmlessness, the pursuit of pain, and the excitement of being happy."." Some readers ask: can you understand that eating chili is without health risk? May not。 People who like to eat chili feel that eating chili "harmless", just based on experience, refers to no obvious acute toxicity, will not eat immediately after the onset of disease. But this does not mean that there is no subacute, chronic health risks, for example, after a long period of eating chili, after a few decades, there has been cancer, this time how to know the cancer and eating chili? Experience cannot be known and scientific methods must be used.
So how do you find that eating something is a cause of a disease? The most reliable approach is a clinical controlled trial comparing the incidence of people who eat something and those who don't eat it. But this method is only suitable for testing drugs, and it is difficult to test food, especially those that require long-term testing to produce consequences, because it is difficult to control the diet of subjects for long periods of time. For example, can we find a group of people who ask them to eat chili peppers every day for 20 years, while another group of people who are similar in other areas do not eat chili for 20 years? Obviously, there is no way to do such an experiment.
The special substance in pepper is capsaicin, and whether the pepper is harmful can be converted into capsaicin, which is harmful. Capsaicin can sometimes be used as a drug, so you can study whether or not a patient has been using capsaicin for a long time. British researchers have reported that 20 patients with detrusor overactivity frequently used capsaicin for intravesical instillation during 5 years. They biopsied the bladder tissue of these patients and found no signs of cancer. But exposure to carcinogens usually takes more than 10 years to show signs of obvious cancer, so the results do not prove that capsaicin is not a carcinogen.
Another method is to do epidemiological studies, investigate dietary profiles of cancer patients, and compare with non cancer patients to see whether chili intake is associated with cancer incidence. Several studies around the world have shown that eating chili peppers increases the risk of cancer. For example, the study found that the risk of Chile to eat chili to develop bladder cancer is 2.9 times not to eat hot peppers; the Mexico study found a lot of people eat hot peppers self-reported risk of gastric cancer is 17.1 times not to eat hot peppers; India researchers investigated oral cancer, esophagus cancer, nasopharyngeal carcinoma, laryngeal cancer patients eating habits. That makes chili powder in risk of these cancers prevalence increased by 1 ~ 2 times; U.S. researchers in the United States to love to eat chili famous Mexico Americans, Cajuns (Luis Anna S French origin), Kerrey white Creole, Heikeli Creole groups, found their gastric cancer and liver cancer were significantly higher eat chili, let the risk of gastric cancer has increased more than 4 times.
But this method has a defect, it only shows that the increased cancer risk habits and eating hot pepper correlation exists, but can not prove the factors of pepper is carcinogenic, there may be associated with the habit of eating chili cause cancer in other environmental factors together, and hot pepper was wronged. So how do you know whether chili is a carcinogen or not? One way is to do animal experiments. Different from human experiments, we can strictly control the diet of experimental animals, the experimental time can be relatively short, and we can dissect the organs of animals to do meticulous research. Some animal experiments have shown that chilies can cause cancer or promote cancer. For example, in rats fed a diet containing 10% peppers, about 60% of the livers of the rats developed cancerous tumors. Another example, in the diet of laboratory animals, contains a certain amount of pepper, can increase the incidence of liver cancer and gastric cancer due to other factors. But there are also experiments showed that mice fed the diet containing 0.25% capsaicin for 79 weeks, has not been found to cause cancer. So the results of animal experiments are not clear.
Another way is to do an in vitro cell experiment and add capsaicin to the cancer cell culture medium to see if it can stimulate the proliferation of cancer cells. Some experiments have found that capsaicin can enhance the vitality of certain cancer cells and stimulate their proliferation, but more experimental results show that capsaicin can inhibit the proliferation of a variety of cancer cells. Of course, this does not mean that eating chili can fight cancer. It is very easy to find substances that inhibit the proliferation of cancer cells in vitro, but in vivo they are quite different.
So, can eating chili actually increase the risk of cancer? We can only say that it is not clear, but still needs further study. Even if one day there is definite evidence that chilies do cause cancer, it's unlikely that people who don't have any spicy food will change their eating habits. There is strong evidence that carcinogens in preserved, grilled and fried foods can significantly increase the risk of cancer, and people are not eating them all the same. Food or health? Sometimes it's not easy to weigh.
