Many of you believed that Romeo loved Juliet? big mistake!!! The real story (never told of course) is that Romeo could not live without eating peppers. He loved his peppers (kind of sick, but that was Romeo, not us). Romeo found out that Juliet’s family owned 20 hectares of peppers, so when he met her, all he could see was a great display of ceviches, stuffed peppers, tiraditos, and different salsas. When he found out that Juliet did not own a single pepper (not even pickled peppers), he went insane and stop eating his peppers, his stomach became susceptible to Helicobacter pylori, Scherichia coli, Salmonella (yes, all the cocktail of bad bacteria) and he died from stomach complications (way too many, he had massive diarrhea). Juliet, who was a little bit stupid (big time), wanted to kiss Romeo for the last time and the Helicobacter and all his bacteria and fungi located in his mouth and saliva (at this point more water and no defensive traits) were transmitted to her (an unusual medical case, reported only here). She died within hours since she was anorexic-bulimic and had no defenses in her body. She needed to eat quinoa, with pepper sauce and cheese to get strong and meaty, but that was too late. Shakespeare wrote kind of a similar version but we like facts and poetry is not our deal (although you have to give us credit for our imagination).
Photo 1: Lovely drawing of Romeo and Juliet done by a 4 year old kid (not really but none of us wants to take credit for this image)
All Capsicum species have interesting medicinal properties. We can go crazy and give you all the scientific information that we found but instead of boring you with all the literature, we will give you some information about few of its medicinal properties, and by the way, you can even fumigate your plants with peppers to repel insect attacks.
First at all, we will provide you with some information that can be used as a conversation starter, you can even impress people. “Did you know that there are more than 40 recognized species of peppers? Can you imagine the variety of food that you can make?" If you receive for an answer “I do not like peppers”, then move to the next person!!
Anyway, according to The Plant List, http://www.theplantlist.org/tpl/search?q=capsicum and TROPICOS (http://www.tropicos.org/) there are 44 species de Capsicum with solved taxonomy (meaning accepted names). You will see in these lists like 270 species, but several of them are synonyms or varieties. For now, we will not bore you with taxonomic details (another time if you wish, we can even show phylogenies, center of origin, domestication and really cool stuff).
Photo 2: Some varieties of Capsicum sp.
Now we go to the chemistry of it, all Capsicum species have to chemical compounds called: Capsaicine y Dehydrocapsaicine. Sounds like another language (Garifune? which is the coolest language ever) and its molecule looks like a broken fragment of a chicken wire. Those are only cool sounding names, do not get scared, but those capsaicinoids are the ones producing the “hot sensation”, and when there are more capsaicinoids more is the hotness of the peppers. The hottest one is called Bhut Jolokia (Capsicum chinensi/Capsicum frutescens,). This one is capable of sending us to the moon (of pain), it is 18 times hotter than the jalapeno and 343 times hotter that the sweat pepper (Liu & Nair, 2010).
Photo 3: Here is the picture depicting the “hotness index”, you can see that Bhut Jolokia is the hottest one. The picture was extracted from the Wall Street Journal http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120191360681137059.html. We explain this since we are trying to avoid lawsuits for “inappropriate use” of the picture and then the journal will take away our guinea pigs called Britney Spears and Justin Bieber (those pets are our only material asset).
According to Web MD (medical website that should be avoided if you are a hypochondriac), peppers can be used to aid digestion, stomach pain, diarrhea. According to the scientific material that we gather for this little blog it seems that most of the studies (we are only quoting some of them) point out that Capsicum spp. have anti-inflammatory properties (Lopez, Gorzalczany, Acevedo, Alonso, & Ferraro, 2012; Zimmer et al., 2012), but when there is already an inflammation in the stomach, the consumption of Capsicum could make things worse (Salam, Szolcsanyi, & Mozsik, 1997). We deduct from this information that Capsicum is used more as a preventive food, meaning, that if you are healthy, eat as many peppers as you want. The peppers will act as a “stomach vaccine” (that is not the word that we want to use, but hey, we are really struggling with the English here) and it will prevent stomach diseases and it is an anti-inflammatory agent (it is proved in chickens and rats).
Another important fact is that Capsicum is an excellent biocide, against Salmonella spp., Escherichia coli (Molina-Torres, Garcia-Chavez, & Ramirez-Chavez, 1999; Soetarno & E., 1997) and other stomach parasites. Beat the pathogens with peppers!!!! We think that if the person is used to eat Caspicum the probabilities of getting travelers’ diarrhea is very low, compared to a person that does not eat spicy food. Now, if you have already typhoid fever and then you decide to eat as many peppers as you can, we are afraid is not going to work, you could make things worse (but we have not tried it yet). Also, we have the duty to inform you that we found a study that reports that Capsicum could increase the risk of developing stomach cancer (Lopezcarrillo, Avila, & Dubrow, 1994). The same study suggests that more research is needed and we did not find too many studies like this one (actually none, but we need to search more).
Anyway, as a separate note, we have some oral reports (from 6 Peruvians and 2 Bolivians) that claim that they were diagnosed in the hospital with stomach ulcers caused by Helicobacter pylori, and they claim that they treated it with Capsicum pubescens (rocoto in Peru, locoto in Bolivia). We do not have the chemical profile for this species in particular but we think something is out there. Maybe there is some compounds in this specific specie that could be effective against Helicobacter pylori, maybe something more complex is going on (and we love that!!!)
As you can see, peppers can be used to enforce your digestive system but it could be risky. We need to add that every human being has a different intestinal flora and this is another reason of why our stomach will not work as your stomach. Study your own body before you take this information for granted. What is good for Paquito, can be poison for Lolita. For now we have to interrupt this blog so we can cook a peanut-cheese-pepper-sauce (ocopa), but in our next blog we will report the truth behind the claim: “Lose weight eating peppers.” Until next time.
Photo 4: Capsicum pubescens
Cited Literature
Lopez, P., S. Gorzalczany, C. Acevedo, R. Alonso, and G. Ferraro. "Chemical Study and Anti-Inflammatory Activity of Capsicum Chacoense and C-Baccatum." Revista Brasileira De Farmacognosia-Brazilian Journal of Pharmacognosy 22, no. 2 (Mar-Apr 2012): 455-58.
Lopezcarrillo, L., M. H. Avila, and R. Dubrow. "Chili-Pepper Consumption and Gastric-Cancer in Mexico - a Case-Control Study." American Journal of Epidemiology 139, no. 3 (Feb 1994): 263-71.
