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I love spicy foods and typically enjoy 1-2 habanero peppers a day. If you like spicy food, there’s good reason to indulge your cravings, as the spicy chemical in peppers – capsaicin – and other compounds in spicy food can improve your health.

Chili peppers, one of the main sources of capsaicin, are regarded as a staple in Central America, Asia, and India, but even in the US there are many devotees to spicy food whose mantra is “the spicier the better.”

One recent food industry report found that more than half of Americans (54 percent) find hot or spicy foods appealing, up from 46 percent in 2009. Those between the ages of 18 and 34 are most likely to order spicy foods from a restaurant menu.1

Interestingly, the heat and pain you experience when you eat chili pepper seeds is designed to make you
not want to eat them (hence protecting the plants’ ability to spread seeds and survive).

And it’s believed that humans are, in fact, the only animal that chooses to willingly eat them. Perhaps, on some level, our bodies have learned to tolerate and even crave chili peppers’ heat because of their many proven benefits to our health.

3 Health Benefits of Spicy Foods

TIME magazine recently featured three of the many reasons why you might want to add some spice to your diet.2

1. Reduce Your Risk of Tumors

Capsaicin has been shown to activate cell receptors in your intestinal lining, creating a reaction that lowers the risk of tumors. Mice genetically prone to develop tumors had reduced tumors and extended lifespans when fed capsaicin, and the researchers believe the compound may turn off an over-reactive receptor that could trigger tumor growth.

Capsaicin has both antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties and has even shown some promise for cancer treatment. Research has shown, for instance, that capsaicin suppresses the growth of human prostate cancer cells while leaving normal cells unharmed.3

In one study, about 80 percent of the prostate cancer cells in mice were killed by capsaicin, while treated tumors shrank to about one-fifth the size of untreated tumors.4

Capsaicin has also been shown to be effective against breast, pancreatic, and bladder cancer cells, although you might need to eat unrealistically large amounts of capsaicin to get such benefits (such as eight habanero peppers a week).5

2. Improve Your Sex Life

In this case, it’s not the spice from chili peppers but that from ginseng and saffron that showed benefit. In a review of purported aphrodisiacs, both ginseng and saffron were found to boost sexual performance.6