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Can Spicy Food Save Your Life?

Want to improve your health?  You need to get spicy with it.

It turns out that turning up the heat factor in your food choices might improve your health. A new study published in the medical journal MBJ  examined the benefits of chillies and other spicy food. Between 2004 and 2008 they tracked 199 293 men and 288 082 women aged 30 to 79 years to see how frequent consumption of spicy foods affected their health and specific mortality. 

Researchers found that eating spicy foods had measurable inverse associations with total mortality for both men and women. In a nutshell:  people who ate spicy food 6 or 7 times per week had a 14% lower risk of death than those who raised the temperature less the once a week.

This backs up previous reports which showed that capsaicin, the component in chilli peppers that makes them spicy, has anti-obesity, antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and anti-cancer properties.

Additionally, the study found, “spices exhibit antibacterial activity and affect gut microbiota populations, which in humans have been related to risks of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, liver cirrhosis, and cancer.”

If you were looking for an excuse to eat more Mexican, Thai, Malaysian or Indian food, here it is on a silver platter.

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