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this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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"Why would you eat me when I make you shit fire??"
Humans: Haha painfully burning mouth go brrrrr
We failed evolutionarily to adapt an immunity to capsaicin. But peppers are super good for us, they are packed with vitamins. So instead we evolved a dopamine response to it that makes them more tolerable and slightly pleasing. This is why when eating something spicy, the heat gets worse after you stop eating, because you stop getting the little dopamine hits that dull the pain. It's also why people love spicy food, you actually get a little high, similar to a runners high.
Not a chance. Peppers and the vast majority of humans still in existence did not interact for most of human evolution. Peppers are a new world plant and the humans who had the most experience and could have evolved along side them lost 90% of their genetic diversity when the Colombian exchange brought them a massive multi-disease plague. The return where peppers came to the rest of the world was in the 16th century. Not really enough time for evolution to guide people towards eating the plant. It’s a very short time on a genetic scale.
That theory may not hold for pepper alone, but capsaicin is found in spicy foods in general and may have health benefits, such as anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties so consuming spicy foods may have provided an advantage in promoting overall health