Secret Agent Spice

A dictionary definition of pungent

Spicy food can be miserable.

Capsaicin belongs to the vanilloid family. It has a special binding property that makes it burn you. Burn you hard. It also has a heavy molecular weight compared to other molecules in the vanilloid fam. Drinking water to cool yourself down won't do much for you because of capsaicin's lipid properties. It is hydrophobic and will not dissolve in water. Using something high in lipids, like milk, would do the trick. Or ice cream! I've made the mistake of eating one of those peppers before, but I did come out of it with a cool shirt. A Scoville Unit indicates the amount of capsaicin present. You'd find anywhere from 2,500 to 8,000 units in a Jalapeño pepper. In the habañero pepper that I ate (picture above) there were about 100,000 to 350,000 Scoville heat units present. Here are photos of the three hottest peppers out there:

Bhut Jolokia 855,000–1,359,000 SHU

Naga Viper Pepper - 855,000–1,359,000 SHU

Red Savina Habañero - 580,000 SHU

So I read an article about spiciness and all that, and I really don't think the creams it mentioned would work all that well for getting rid of the pain caused by spicy foods. But when you are really in pain from something spicy, I think getting any help at all is more than welcome. I think it's interesting that humans are drawn at all to spicy things. I mean, I am too, but naturally the effect of capsaicin is the equivalent to a thorn. It's an irritant. Animals don't even like this sort of thing. But then, humans are pretty strange.

There was a table in that article where the difference between capsaicin and dihydrocapsaicin was just one double bond between the carbons in capsaicin. The difference between capsaicin and homocapsaicin (which means "same as capsaicin") is the direction of the carbon after the double bonds. Capsaicin is thought to be a double-edged sword because it has both chemotherapeutic properties, but also cancer-causing properties. This chemical is thought to make you use burn more calories and thus not acquire fat.