Question: what is it in chill that reliefs pain

Ali Hill answered on 14 Jun 2018:

Great question and I’m glad you asked! 🙂

Chillis have something in them called capsaicin. The hotter a chilli, the more capsaicin it contains. Capsaicin tricks the body into thinking it’s in pain – probably easiest explained using a baseball analogy.

Ok, so imagine you have a door with a baseball glove on it. When there’s a baseball in the glove the door opens and you feel pain. The baseball would be what happens when you burn yourself or you have something really cold – so the door’s a temperature sensor basically. The baseball glove only fits certain sized balls – a football would be too big. But you could get a tennis ball in it. The tennis ball is capsaicin. So it opens the “door” and makes you think that you’re feeling pain from heat. That’s why you get the burning feeling in your mouth.

Then what happens is that your brain gets overwhelmed with the messages saying it’s in pain and stops hearing them – so kinda like the door being open all the time. Or using another analogy it’s like when your facebook feed fills up and you can’t read all the messages.

So you stop feeling pain, but this is actually really useful and it’s used in medicine. You can get creams that have a tiny tiny amount of capsaicin in them that are used to relieve pain in osteoarthritis.

Isn’t food amazing?!