I absolutely love spicy food, and it’s never affected my gut. I was actually confused when I read about people getting the shits after a curry and wondered if it was a joke. I’ve had curries so hot it caused people to recoil into a coughing and sweating fit after they dipped their finger in and had a taste and I have one every other day. I feel the burning in my mouth, my face turns red, my forehead sweats, my esophagus feels weird, but (tmi I know lol) when I go to the toilet I’m completely fine. no gut pains either.
I’ve found that as I get older, my guy is more affected by got stuff with seeds. The more seeds, the more irritated my belly gets.
Most of the gastrointestinal distress from capsaicin is the result of poison countermeasures triggered by contact pain signals.
But capsaicin is telling your cells a lie which fewer believe each re-telling, so it requires increasingly ridiculous doses to trigger those internal signals.
If you eat spicy food regularly, you likely won’t get any internal signals again until you graduate to a different category of spiciness, such as extracts.
Hot sauce nerds consider extracts cheating, since you can achieve heat that’s many orders of magnitude above what the hottest pepper hybrids can produce, but do what you must to feel alive.
Oh, and in case you’re looking for recommendations, my current daily driver is Blair’s “Ultra Death.”
To set expectations, Tobasco (a common North American vinegar-based chili sauce) has a heat rating of 7,000 scovilles, whereas Ultra Death generally measures over 1 million.
If you like heat, extracts are a cost-effective step up, since each bottle lasts longer. At first anyway.
Acidic foods effect my belly more. Tons of tomato sauce, for example, and I get some acid reflux.
But spicy? Bring it on.
All about acid and volume. Too much of anything and there’s no where else to go.
Spicy is just for the taste buds, and reallllllly spicy comes with a bonus reminder the next day.
I love spicy foods and they don’t upset my stomach. Though I did eat one of those “one chip challenge” things back in the day and I did fine at the time but the next two days or so I felt like I had been poisoned. Only time that ever happened to me. You probably have a threshold too but it’s just very high. Genetics and practice helps, your gut biome critters are probably used to it too.
Was very happy to eat spicy foods until mid-late 40s, when I had to moderate because something just spontaneously switched as I got older and now my GI tract is unhappy if I eat a vindaloo, godfuckingdamnit.
I’m worried this is happening to me right now. I’m in my mid-40s and lately the day after all the spicy foods I usually consume have not been pleasant. Is there no fix for this??
Sucks bro. I mean, I can still tolerate what most people consider to be spicy food. At least “white guy” spicy. But no, I can’t eat the same kind of spicy food that I used to enjoy. It’s just a natural thing as you get older. This is a well known phenomenon. No fix.
It’s because you don’t drink as much as other people. People who chug a ton of of water or whatever after they’ve eaten something spicy are giving themselves diarrhea.
Sauce: a Taiwanese lady.
Capsacin is not soluble in water, so water and spicy food don’t really interact. Unless the water is contaminated, chugging water won’t do more than make you pee.
The capsacin applying signals as if your bowels are literally on fire and your body reacting to it as if it’s poisonous will, though. Many people can apply the same trick they can apply when they get the shits from milk: just consume a decent amount of it every day and your body will get used to it eventually. Not recommended if you have roommates or a difficult to reach toilet, though.
Of course it could be that standard Taiwanese drinking water is so contaminated that chugging it does give you mild food poisoning, but that doesn’t change the fact that people not eating large amounts of capsacin still get the shits when they eat spicy food.
It supposed to affect your gut?
Spicy food never has an effect on me once it’s done burning my mouth.
Maybe there were a few times that it felt a little spicy coming out, but that’s very rare.
Yeah I’ve never had issues with spicy foods causing anything but mouth feels and I’ve tried sauces like the last dab (not often but I tried their nugget w/ 3 sauces they had in the freezer section)
I get heart burn more from sugary shit it seems.
How old are you? I used to be like you. I still hold the spice tolerance. I recently ate a spicy chicken burger they made me sign a waiver for because of how spicy it is. My body handled it okay. While I didn’t get diarrhea, my gut’s complaining.
32 and I’ve been into spicy food since I was like 20 lol
You’ve got a limited amount of years before it changes. It might not be dramatic, but you’ll reach a point where things start catching up with you.
ok now I’m definitely treating myself to a curry tonight lol, I’m gonna milk this blessing for all it’s worth 😂
My man! Im 32 as well and have been feeling a bit worse for wear, it couldnt be all the alcohol right?, and some nice spicy curry sounds delicious for tonight.
You know what? I forgot to account for the alcohol. You’ll probably be fine for a lot of years. I’m not the average person when it comes to that and I definitely noticed a lot of other changes to my health when I sobered up for a month last year. Having a convo with a friend about how we don’t heal as quickly as we did in our twenties probably distorted my thinking a bit.
idk i’m pushing 5 decades and i ferment my own habanero hot sauce cuz i can’t buy anything hotter. I eat gochujang with pretty much everything. The only time i have ever suffered from hot things is when i ate one of those One Chip Challenges. I usually stay away from capsaicin extracts/concentrations but my kid wanted to do it. My stomach hurt for about 30 minutes then stopped, that was the extent of it!
This is the answer. I would put the ‘nuclear death in a bottle’ type sauces on everything in my 20s. Switched to more normal hot sauce in my 30s. Since 40, even that has to be done in moderation. My fridge is full of hot sauces gifted to me that I won’t touch, but the extended family still thinks I like.
I was unbothered by it as well, at least intestinally, the physical pain of something hot enough was certainly something I could experience and dislike at the extreme end but my stomach and bowels would have been fine. That it until about the past 5 years or so when my stomach suddenly decided it couldn’t handle all kind of things that were never a problem before and now I totally get what people were talking about. It’s pretty sad, I miss being able to reliably tolerate highly spicy food.
As somebody who’s stomach is SEVERELY affected by spicy food, I suspect that you’re just a statistical outlier, like myself. Don’t sweat it. Instead, lean in. Be the “I can eat anything spicy and be fine” guy amongst your friends.
I have this talent as well; I use sriracha instead of ketchup on my burger and fries, with hot peppers.
But let me warn you, do not think this holds true when you have hemorrhoids. It will put you in a different universe of pain.
Question: do vinegar based spicy sauces hurt?
I share this blessing. I’m still confused by how exactly people are tasting how spicy their precious meal was when it’s on the way back out.
I used to live in New Mexico for a while and there was a common joke: how do you tell if someone is a native New Mexican? They keep a fire extinguisher in the bathroom.
It’s not so much that you taste it on the way out, it’s that there’s undigested capsaicin that burns, uh, other mucus membranes on the way out. Fortunately not something that bothers me much either, but I get hints of it sometimes when my niece makes what I call her nuclear fire curry.
The uhh, simplified version, is that the way out has the same reciptors as the way in when it comes to spiciness.
Most people have taste receptors in their gut as well as on their tongue. It helps regulate how quickly your muscles contract to move stuff along through your intestine.
Some people don’t have as many, and some people build up a tolerance to capsaicin (in both their mouth and gut).
Capsaicin trigger nociceptors, tricking the brain into believing you’ve hurt yourself. It’s not a flavour.
I use obscene amounts of Tabasco. The only thing it does to my gut is that my stomach can become a bit too acidic.
I mean tobasco is a vinegar sauce so the acidity thing make sense. Btw they have a family reserve version where they use fancier vinegar. It’s good too.
I’ve started rolling my own inspired by (but nowhere close to) Tabasco. The main aim was to make it less acidic.
What were things like for you pre-tabasco?
Pretty basic, I’d assume.
How do you expect them to remember being in the womb?
