2025-11-10 – News – www.theguardian.com
Tearing up, sweating and other bodily functions are all signs that the body is trying to expel spicy foods as quickly as possible. But there is a simple reason why some people enjoy those sensations
The first thing to understand about eating spicy food is that it really isn’t a matter of taste. Capsaicin, the active chemical in capsicum plants that are a key ingredient in anything you’d think of as “spicy”, evolved as an irritant to stop mammals from chewing and destroying plant seeds. It acts on the nervous system directly through receptors in the tongue, throat and skin – no taste buds required – and, in theory, tells our bodies that the thing we’ve just ingested is something to get rid of as soon as possible. The obvious question, then, is: why do some of us like the sensation so much?
To start to understand that, it’s helpful to know a bit more about what’s going on in the body. “Think of an engineering brief where we have to detect irritants in a system and…
