Benefits of eating chili every day

A new study shows that spicy spices such as chili and pepper play a huge role in fighting obesity.

Previous studies have shown that spicy foods can reduce the risk of premature death from cancer, cardiovascular disease and respiratory problems. In addition, a recent study by American and Chinese scientists has shown why eating chili peppers can help fight obesity by preventing intestinal inflammation and insulin resistance.

The “hero” is none other than capsaicin, a substance found in chili peppers, which is what gives us the spicy taste when we eat chili peppers.

Scientists fed mice a high-fat diet along with capsaicin. After a period of time, scientists found that the mice's weight increased insignificantly.

Researchers concluded that capsaicin has a preventive effect on the risks of obesity.

Capsaicin in chili peppers has been shown to help prevent obesity. Photo: Shutterstock/Teri Virbickis.

Different peppers contain different amounts of capsaicin, and therefore their spiciness. The spiciness of peppers is measured in Scoville Heat Units (SHU), which were introduced by American chemist Wilbur Scoville in 1912.

The world's hottest peppers that have been recorded in the Guinness Book of Records are Carolina Reaper (1,500,000-2,000,000 SHU), Trinidad Moruga Scorpion (1,200,000-2,000,000 SHU), Bhut jolokia (900,000-1,000,000 SHU).

In 2015, researchers from the University of Oxford, the Harvard School of Public Health (USA) and the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences conducted a survey of nearly 500,000 middle-aged people. The researchers found that people who regularly ate chili peppers once or twice a day had a 14% lower risk of death from cancer, cardiovascular disease and respiratory problems.

Scientists from the International Agency for Research on Cancer, part of the WHO, said that every 11cm increase in waist size increases the risk of obesity-related cancers by 13%.

Not all cancers are linked to belly fat and body weight, but researchers say waist size is strongly linked to 10 cancers, including bowel, esophageal, stomach, liver, gallbladder, pancreatic, uterine, ovarian, kidney and postmenopausal breast cancer.

Brain scans of overweight, obese and type 2 diabetic people show structural abnormalities in the brain compared to normal people. The gray matter (where nerve cells are mainly concentrated) in their brains is much thinner than in healthy people. This is a harbinger of future neurodegenerative diseases such as dementia and Alzheimer's disease.

According to Zing