Wounded King

Forget some sort of mild euphoria, what about the hallucinations associated with the Guatemalan Insanity pepper

openeyes

Not that this comment is really on subject, but I made some jerk chicken once and use some Scotch bonnet peppers or something similar and my hands burned for HOURS afterward. So wear gloves or something when chopping hot peppers.

Scandal

DigitalChicken,

You wrote: "Actually someone has bred a jalepeno without it."

Why would anyone bother to eat it? That's as silly as drinking alcohol-free beer!

Tharmas

Aggies, gotta love 'em!

Sad but true, researchers at Texas A & M University developed the mild Jalapeno pepper.

Jalapenos actually have a lot of flavor other than the heat, and the Aggies wanted to make that flavor available to sissies and other assorted cowards as well as those of us who LOVE the HEAT.

As for the high, I feel my heart rate increase about the time the tears start to come. Just a little, legal rush.

tribalbeeyatch

I'm not sure about the GI tract, but hot peppers can lead to excitotoxicity in neurons. That is perhaps one of the ways that people grow accustomed to spicy foods, by killing off the capsaicin-sensitive gustatory receptors.

Oh, and an interesting flip-side to the vanilloid receptors responding to both heat and spice is that the menthol receptors have been found to also respond to cold (this was also some of David Julius' work, I think). So, it's not just by some sort of synaesthetic accident that we call spicy foods 'hot' and minty ones 'cool'.

bleubird

Yes,peppers select for birds.Because birds do not have the receptors for pepper oils.However, plants "get" us to do a lot of things for them.Cultivation is one.Deforestation is another.
I know that this has been writen about.But, can not remember the author.Can anyone help here?
bleubird

God Fearing Atheist

Discover said that "Chili seeds eaten and then expelled by birds are three times more likely to germinate than those that fall off the plant naturally."

From here.

-GFA

ps418

That's chemical hyperalgesia, an increased sensitivity to painful stimuli associated with inflammation. Like when you burn yourself, and the burned area becomes hypersensitive to touch and heat. In experiemental animal models of pain, capsaicin is often used to induce hyperalgesia. One of the interesting things I learned about cannabinoids a couple weeks ago is that in animal models, cannabinoid receptor agonists greatly diminish the hyperalgesic response to capsaicin.

Patrick

Boro Nut

This can't be a reason, otherwise wood would taste nicer and end up in less stools.

Boro Nut

Boro Nut

You never change Patrick. What made you decide not to tell us the intersting thing?

Boro Nut