Mangiare piccante allunga la vita

Lo studio è stato condotto in Cina per sette anni con circa 500.000 partecipanti. Un team composto da ricercatori internazionali, con a capo l’Accademia cinese di Scienze mediche, ha scoperto che chi consuma cibi piccanti almeno una o due volte la settimana ha una riduzione del rischio di mortalità del 10%. Se si aggiungono le spezie piccanti ai pasti tutti i giorni, il rischio di mortalità si abbassa del 14%. Il merito parrebbe essere dovuto al contenuto di capsaicina e vitamina c presenti nelle spezie piccanti.

La ricerca

La ricerca è stata pubblicata sul British Medical Journal e comprendeva persone dai 35 ai 79 anni provenienti da diverse aree della Cina.

 I partecipanti hanno dovuto spiegare quali spezie consumassero abitualmente e con quale frequenza. La risposta più comune è stato il peperoncino, molto diffuso e utilizzato in queste regioni. “Molti dei benefici del peperoncino, tra cui quelli della capsaicina, l’alcaloide che genera la piccantezza, ormai sono noti: anti-ossidante, anti-infiammatorio e anti-cancro”, ha affermato la ricercatrice Nita Forouhi dell’Università di Cambridge.

Lo studio è di tipo osservativo e per questo gli esperti ritengono che vadano fatti degli ulteriori approfondimenti per generare dei cambi nell’alimentazione. “Sicuramente è necessaria un’altra ricerca per verificare se il cibo piccante è veramente in grado di portare benefici alla salute e ridurre i rischi di morte oppure se il risultato è influenzato da altri fattori esterni all’alimentazione”, affermano i ricercatori.

Hot Finding: Spicy Food Linked with Longer Life

by Agata Blaszczak-Boxe, Contributing Writer

Firing up the flavors in your food may help you live longer: Eating spicy foods frequently may be tied to a slightly lower risk of an earlier death, according to a new study. However, more research is needed to confirm the link, experts say.

In the study, researchers asked nearly 500,000 people in China how often they ate hot, spicy foods. The participants were ages 30 to 79 when the study started, and the researchers followed up with them for about seven years, during which time about 20,000 of the people died.

The researchers found that the people in the study who ate spicy foods one or two days a week were 10 percent less likely to die during the study, compared with those who ate spicy foods less than once a week, according to the study published today (Aug. 4) in the journal The BMJ.

Moreover, the people in the study who ate spicy foods three or more days a week were 14 percent less likely to die during the study, compared with those who ate spicy foods less than once a week. [Extending Life: 7 Ways to Live Past 100]

However, the study was observational, and so it is too early to tell whether there is a causal relationship between eating spicy food and lower mortality, said study author Lu Qi, an associate professor at Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts. "We definitely need more data from other populations," Qi told Live Science.

The researchers don't know why exactly the consumption of spicy food may be linked to lower mortality, but previous research on cells and animals has suggested several possible mechanisms, Qi said. For example, the consumption of spicy foods has been shown to lower inflammation, improve the breakdown of fat in the body and change the composition of gut bacteria, he said.

In the study, the researchers also asked the participants to specify the main sources of spices they typically used, allowing them to choose between fresh chili pepper, dried chili pepper, chili sauce and chili oil. Fresh and dried chili peppers were the most frequently used types of spices among the people who ate spicy food at least once a week, the researchers said.

However, "itis unclear whether the observed associations are the direct result of chili intake, or whether chili is simply a marker for other beneficial but unmeasured dietary components," said Nita Forouhi, a nutritional epidemiologist at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, who was not involved in the study, in a editorial published with the study in the journal.

At this point, researchers don't know for sure whether eating spicy foods can have a beneficial effect on human health and mortality, Forouhi wrote. "Future research is needed to establish whether spicy food consumption has the potential to improve health and reduce mortality directly, or if it is merely a marker of other dietary and lifestyle factors," she said.