Spicy Foods & Your Gut

Capsaicin, the compound in hot peppers that makes them spicy, is a chemical irritant and a neurotoxin. However, humans being humans, we decided to eat them for fun.

In contrast to many other things that humans recreationally enjoy despite them being objectively poisonous (for example alcohol, tobacco, many other drugs), consuming capsaicin (in moderation) is considered to have health benefits, such as aiding weight loss (by boosting metabolism) and reducing inflammation.

We’ve written before about those well-studied benefits: Capsaicin For Weight Loss And Against Inflammation

…and also about some of the risks: How Internal Organs Can Be Affected By Spicy Foods

The risks are usually only if one takes very spicy food without building up tolerance first by regularly enjoying less spicy foods and working one’s way up the hotness scale, but still, it’s important to know that if you do inadvisably and/or accidentally eat something well above your normal tolerance level, then the fact that you just ate a poison for which your body was unprepared will have consequences (specifically: bad ones).

Most people who do not regularly enjoy spices will be able to vividly imagine the connection between spice consumption and how happy one’s gut is about it, and that imagination may nor conjure a very pleasant image. But, assuming we do indeed have and/or build up a comfortable tolerance to the point that we do indeed regularly enjoy spicy food, what does the science have to say about what that’s doing to our gut?

The Spice Must Flow

Or rather, with apologies to Frank Herbert:

• the spice must proceed regularly through the gastrointestinal tract (i.e. habituation)
• the spice must then be further metabolized by the liver (i.e. hepatic metabolism)

Researchers (Dr. Angela Elena Martínez-Medina et al.) investigated this thoroughly, and found…

Capsaicin improves gut microbiota composition! Specifically, it promotes beneficial bacteria (especially short-chain-fatty-acid-producers such as butyrate-forming microbes) and reduces pro-inflammatory bacteria.

Dose matters, though:

• low doses support gut mucin secretion, increase microbial diversity, and prevent dysbiosis (these are all good things for it to do)
• high doses (>80 mg/kg) may cause intestinal damage and reduce helpful bacteria like Akkermansia muciniphila.

To illustrate that high dose, 80mg/kg means, if you weigh the same as this writer, you’d need to consume 6g of capsaicin to hit that danger zone. Not 6g of chilli mass or chilli powder, but 6g of capsaicin. If you’re getting this from peppers, then for example cayenne pepper (a good source of capsaicin) contains around 2.5mg of capsaicin per 1 gram of cayenne. Which means you’d need to consume 2.4kg of cayenne pepper to hit that danger zone. That’s a little over 5 lbs. Now, this writer here likes spicy food, but even she goes lighter on the seasoning than 2.4kg of cayenne per meal. Hopefully you do too.

You may be wondering: why was that even tested, then? And the answer is: because while cayenne is a very good source of capsaicin from food, the sky’s the limit when it comes to capsaicin from supplements. So, check doses when using those!

The researchers had more to say about its effects, including:

❝It crosses the blood–brain barrier, alters neurotransmitter levels, and accumulates in brain regions involved in cognition.

In addition to its systemic effects, capsaicin appears to undergo microbial transformation and influences gut microbial composition, favoring short-chain fatty acid producers and suppressing pro-inflammatory taxa.

These changes contribute to anti-obesity, anti-inflammatory, and potentially anticancer effects.❞

You can read the paper in full, here: Capsaicin as a Microbiome Modulator: Metabolic Interactions and Implications for Host Health

Want to learn more?

You might like this book that we reviewed a little while back:

Healing Spices: How to Use 50 Everyday and Exotic Spices to Boost Health and Beat Disease – by Dr. Bharat Aggarwal & Debora Yost

Enjoy!