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’m the same as you. No issues at all. Wasn’t till maybe 5 years ago I even got a minor tingle on my butthole.
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.
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.
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.
I only ever hear that in movies. I assumed it happens if you eat low grade meat or smth like in the wild west in the US back in the day and it just became an old wives’ tale turned pop culture myth.
I do actually not like spicy food though, especially Chinese and Indian, but I’ve had enough of it to know I never had any gut issues.
It supposed to affect your gut?
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 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.
There’s a few factors.
First is genetics. Not everyone has the same base level reaction to peppers and/or capsaicin. And it can be either of them causing intestinal rebellion. Some people just don’t respond well to even sweet peppers.
Second is habitation. The more spicy stuff you eat in general, the more your body adapts to it.
But, there’s also variances in mucosa. Our guts, the colon in specific, opportunists produce snot. It’s essentially the same as what coats your throat and sinuses. Not exactly the same, but the same basic ingredients and purpose. Separate from how you respond to the food, and how used to it you are, some people produce more than others.
In your case, I suspect that you have a higher resistance genetically, and produce mucous in your gut that protects you from the irritants that spicy foods have.
If you also have a healthy gut biome going, it’ll add a layer of resistance to things being over stimulated.
And that’s what causes the diarrhea and cramping for most people. The chemicals irritate tissues, so your body treats or like an emergency. That means to increase bowel motility and flush the guts with water. Which means squiiirt.
Boring ass comment, but same. I’m 36 and can’t stop eating spicy foods.
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.
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 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.
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.
and that’s not a lye
How do you expect them to remember being in the womb?
Question: do vinegar based spicy sauces hurt?
I’m not op but no they don’t do anything special. I love Carolina style spicy barbecue
So like, I think it’s less to do with spiciness, and more to do with certain ingredients that people’s bodies aren’t used to, or even might have a negative reaction to.
Might also be that spicyness essentially is lowering the threshold that heat sensing nerves fire at till it’s below ambient body temperature, maybe, if someone not used to hot food it tricks the intestines in to thinking they’ve been burnt and releasing water as a sort of wound response? Maybe? IDK.
Anyone want to take a capsaicin pill for science?
Nope. It’s definitely the piquancy.
