Why does spicy food make me cry?

Why does spicy food make me cry?

By Meera

You have just taken a nice big mouthful of a delicious curry. After you’ve started chewing, the panic starts, and you feel a burning pain in your mouth, and the tears start streaming down your face. What’s happening in your mouth and brain to cause this?! 

What makes food spicy?

The star compound that makes spicy food spicy is capsaicin (pronounced cap-say-uh-sin). Capsaicin is the ingredient in chillies that makes them spicy. It attaches to a special receptor in the tongue which send signals to your brain which makes you think your mouth is being burnt. For those of you who are interested, these receptors are called TRPV1 receptors, or the capsaicin receptor. It’s responsible for keeping our body temperature constant and detecting anything that might cause us pain, which is why it tells our brains when there’s hot or spicy food. The scientist who was in charge of the lab that discovered this heat and pain receptor is called David Julius, and he won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for this work! 

Interestingly, this special receptor is present in birds, as well as animals like us, mammals. You don’t ever see a bird start crying after eating a chilli seed, though. The reason for this is because this receptor doesn’t work the same way in birds, and so they don’t feel the spice. Scientists think this is so the birds can digest the chilli seeds and poop the seeds out in a different place. This helps the chilli plant keep growing and makes sure that their ‘children’ survive. In mammals, we have teeth that would destroy the seeds, not to mention the fact we don’t poop in fields. 

Anyway, now the spice has attached to this special receptor. It’s sent signals up to your brain for help. Your brain now thinks that you’ve been attacked by something hot and your body enters fight or flight mode, and releases lots of different chemicals, including natural pain killers. This is all within the first seconds of you being in the middle of your first bite of curry. 

So, how does this fight or flight reaction lead to you crying? 

There are loads of reasons why you start crying. The first is to try and flush out the spice through your tears, which also reduces some of the irritation. The brain confuses the heat with the feeling of pain, and so you also start crying due to the feeling of pain. The fight or flight reaction also causes the release of chemicals that trigger lots of different emotions, like relief, and this can cause you to start crying as well! 

What happens if you have too much capsaicin?

Did you know there are competitions where people try and eat the spiciest food on earth? 

Since capsaicin is the thing that is spicy, and chillies are full of it, people have created a scale for spiciness of these chillies. It’s called the Scoville scale. A bell pepper (that you have in your salad, or on your pizza) is 0, Jalapeño pepper that you have on your pizza is 2500-10000, and the hottest chilli in the world is the Carolina Reaper, at over 1.5 million! I wouldn’t be eating that even if you paid me. 

If you eat too much capsaicin, you might get poisoned. It can lead to feeling sick, vomiting, tummy pain, and horrible burning pain while you have diarrhoea. So maybe best to stay off the Carolina Reaper for the time being. If you are keeping spicy food in your diet, though, the best way to fix the burning pain is to drink a glass of cold milk, or to drink lukewarm water with a teaspoon of sugar in it.