Eating spicy food may be good for your health.
Trisha Pasricha, MD
Here’s great news for people who love to feel the burn: The purported benefits of spicy foods have a strong scientific basis.
In 2015, a major study published in the British Medical Journal showed an association between consuming spicy foods and living longer. From 2004 to 2008, scientists enrolled more than half a million adults in China and tracked their health over the next several years. Several thousand in the group, not surprisingly, died during that time.
But the surprising part? Even after controlling for multiple possible confounders - such as smoking, physical activity, and intake of red meat and fresh fruits and vegetables - adults whose spicy food intake averaged six or seven days a week had a 14 percent lower relative risk of dying than those whose intake averaged less than once a week. Eating spicy foods was associated with a reduced risk of death from cancer and heart and lung diseases.
