In This ArticleView AllIn This ArticleWhy Do Spicy Foods Taste Hot?How Do You Stop the Burning?How Do you Make Spicy Foods Less Spicy?
In This ArticleView All
View All
In This Article
Why Do Spicy Foods Taste Hot?
How Do You Stop the Burning?
How Do you Make Spicy Foods Less Spicy?
We’ve all lived through it: Thinking you can take the heat of a spicy dish and then realizing, to your horror and your friends' amusement, that your mouth has become a fiery hell that, like hiccups, seems never-ending but really only lasts a few minutes.
Dinner Recipes for When You’re Craving Something Spicy
“If you put some sugar on your skin, you’re not going to feel sweet, but rather than having specialized receptors or cells, spiciness triggers receptors that are common in the body on the end of sensory nerve endings,” saysDanielle Reed, associate director of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia and a noted researcher in the science of taste who conducted a study to see if sensitivity to capsaicin could be genetic. “So if you put a chile pepper on your eye—and you shouldnotdo that—you’ll get a burning feeling.”
That’s why, long after the sensation of heat fades in your mouth, you’re often reminded of the “heat” from a very spicy meal, well, later on. “Mucous membranes in particular—not to be indelicate, but they do call it ‘the burn that bites twice’—have much more accessible sensory nerve fibers,” Reed says.
Our reaction to capsaicin is a clue to why spiciness exists at all. Birds, unlike us mammals, don’t sense capsaicin as heat, so a leading theory is that plants evolved so that birds could still eat the fruit (the chile pepper) of the plant and propagate its seeds while dissuading mammals from eating and damaging the plant itself. The way spiciness works in humans also provides a disturbing hint at the havoc COVID-19 may be wreaking on our physiology. It’s well-known that one of COVID’s telltale symptoms isloss of smell and taste, but many sufferers have also completely lost their ability to sense the heat from capsaicinoids—meaning the virus may be fundamentally altering our nerve endings.
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How Do You Stop the Burning from Spicy Food?
We’ll just give you the bad news up front: There’s no magic potion that’s going to be able to put out that five-alarm fire raging between your tonsils.
Don’t believe him? Unfortunately, taste scientist Reed agrees. “I know there are a lot of home remedies, but I don’t know of any scientific principle that’ll let you out,” she says.
Milk and Other Dairy Products
The most commonly espoused home remedy is consuming dairy products, as they contain proteins called caseins that bind neatly with capsaicinoids, preventing any capsaicin that hasn’t already hooked onto a receptor from latching on, safely washing the now-neutralized compounds down your gullet instead. Many foodies have suggested that whole milk is better than skim milk for this purpose.
“In practice, you can rinse out the reinforcements that would prolong the sensation, [though] you’re not going to alleviate what you’re already feeling,” McGee says. “Fatty materials, milk included, will tend to pick up stray molecules in our mouths.”
Bread, Honey and Other Distractions
Many of the other frequently heard antidotes for spicy foods are essentially just distractions, including bread or honey. “A possibility is that bread is a solid, so you’re chewing on it and generating all sorts of other touch sensations distracting you from the pain,” McGee says. “Like what’s going on with bread, sweetness is a distraction, and so your brain is apportioning the attention it can pay to things.”
Ice Cubes
For the most immediate relief from spicy heat, McGee suggested literally cooling things down—even if the “heat” you feel from a chile isn’t really related to temperature. “The temperature effect is probably the quickest way you can deal with the problem,” he says. “Get an ice cube out of your drink and suck on it.”
How Do You Make Spicy Foods Less Spicy Before You Eat Them?
It should go without saying that if you want your food to be mild, then go easy on the chiles. But we’ve all made mistakes, like misjudging a recipe or forgetting that, when it comes to chile peppers, it’s the smaller, younger ones that are spicier than the bigger, older ones.
As with stopping the burning in your mouthafteryou’ve eaten spicy, there are a lot of widely accepted but scientifically unproven techniques for toning down a spicy dish, like adding honey. But the only guaranteed method is to dilute it, meaning you may need to double (or more) every ingredient in your recipe except the chiles.
Another approach is to have something on hand to coat your mouth so you can prevent capsaicin from hitting those nerve endings at all. “Especially something like sour cream, which is fatty, will absorb that stuff and coat your tongue to make it difficult,” McGee says.
However, if you’re determined to avoid experiencing anything close to the time you bravely ate a Naga Viper on a dare and possibly emitted real steam from your ears, there’s one rule that will undoubtedly keep you out of harm’s way: There’s absolutely no shame in ordering the grilled cheese.
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