Why does spicy food make people feel pain?

Have you ever had such an experience? When you were eating a very spicy dish in a China or Mexican restaurant, you accidentally bit a millet pepper. At this point, your feeling changes from enjoyment to severe pain. If this happens, you will know that there is a clear line between enjoyment and pain in the kingdom of taste. Next, let's discuss their relationship.

It is easy to explain why peppers cause pain from a physiological point of view. On your tongue, taste buds are connected with pain fibers that feel hurt. Therefore, the same chemicals that can stimulate the taste bud receptors will also stimulate the connected pain fibers. For pepper, this chemical is capsaicin. If you want to enjoy a spicy and delicious meal, you must keep the capsaicin in the food at a low enough level, so that your taste receptors will be more active than your pain receptors.

But you may want to know why different people have such different preferences for spicy food. It is often difficult for people to understand why their friends can or can't eat spicy food. We can still explain this difference from a physiological point of view. Therefore, super tasters (people with more taste bud cells are called super tasters) have significantly more taste bud cells on their tongues than non-super tasters. Therefore, people with more taste bud cells can easily respond to the severe pain caused by capsaicin.

The difference of taste bud cell density in different people seems to be genetic. Women are more likely to be super tasters than men. Super tasters are usually more sensitive to bitter chemicals, and bitterness is the characteristic of most toxic substances. It is conceivable that if women have been playing the role of nurturing the next generation in the process of human evolution, then the offspring with sensitive taste will easily survive. Because the taste state is hereditary, you can find the difference of taste preference in very young children. Super tasters aged 5-7 prefer milk to cheese. Non-tasters are the opposite. Why? Compared with non-tasters, super tasters find milk sweeter and cheese more bitter. Therefore, genetic differences can explain why some children have a strong taste preference.

But let's go back to eating in the restaurant. What you need to pay attention to is that the pain will weaken over time. From this point of view, the pain receptor in your mouth is the same as other receptors: with the delay of time, the receptor will respond to a constant stimulus. This is good news! You will be happy because your sensory process provides a memory relief mechanism.