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Humans eat spicy foods for other than the nutritional value it sometimes includes. They eat it for how it helps the immune system fight against bacteria that kills people. It doesn't matter whether chile peppers, garlic, onions, and leeks has any nutritional value as long as the chemicals in them destroy unfriendly gut bacteria, and promote the growth of friendly gut bacteria that manufactures all the vitamins the body needs to prevail over nature.
My personal and contaminated research into the notion that the human immune system is composed in it's entirety by their gut bacteria doesn't appear to be going away. Contrarily, I continue to be moved by information from all the cooking shows on TV instead of relying on the medicos who are using placebo-like suggestion to get me to believe I'll be just another victim of the worst case scenario.
This line of thought started when I heard what amounts to a rumor that in some parts of Italy the food they cook is the medicine they take on a daily basis. They eat foods that depress the unfriendly gut bacteria, and have heaping helpings of food and drink that promotes the growth of friendly gut bacteria.
Yesterday I found myself watching a program about chili peppers, and how the cultures that eat them have a lot fewer health problems than cultures who avoid them. The capsaicin in chili peppers gets rid of the bad gut bacteria in the same way onions and garlics and leeks do. Besides, the foodies talked about how peoples who eat peppers can turn the pain associated with the hotness of peppers into pleasure (sometime with a sexual bent), and instead of feeling pain when they eat peppers they feel pleasure.
This is not exactly new thought. Before refrigeration made food preservation handier, a lot of the ways people preserved foods was with products that kept the unfriendly bacteria away from the food they tried to keep from rottening during the off seasons. Like preserving olives in olive oil. Eventually the olive oil will oxidate and spoil the broth, but it keeps food alive for months until it does.
I'm not much of an expert on preserving food, so the ways the old people did it. Even my parent's generation practiced these methods. Most of the homes in the neighborhoods I grew up in had smoke houses for salt curing ham and bacon. My mother "put up" half gallon jars of vegetable soup mix for the winter for years even after she got her first refrigerator. Canned foods became prevalent and were the basic products for separate grocery stores.
Having a "strong constitution" in the past meant that a person's gut bacteria was in balance and they didn't get sick every time other people did because of something they all et. The idea is that friendly gut bacteria destroy unfriendly bacteria, but sometimes it's the gut environment itself that makes the difference in whether the friendly bacteria can win this war of the gods.
Salt preserves meat because unfriendly gut bacteria can't survive in a salt-laden environment. They gotta have oxygen to breed successfully, and that's why antioxidants are supposed to be good for you. It's also why smoke is used to cure meat. Smoke protects by killing off the oxygen in the curing process.
This is a priori speculation at it's worst. '-) Read my disclaimer at the top. I'm not trying to tell the truth here, but rather, I'm writing to see what comes out when I entertain certain ideas.
Yesterday, after I watched the TV show on chili peppers, I went and bought some peppers and used an onion and some garlic and a can of pinto beans and made me a killer of a supper. There was so much anti-unfriendly gut bacteria stuff in the meal I made, that the crown of my head was still singing when I woke up this morning.
I only ate a small bowl of it. This morning I turned the stove back on and put some frozen breasts of chicken into this spicy goop, and I'm going to eat some of it for breakfast soon. Right after I drink some kefir that contains trillions of friendly bacteria to help fight the good fight.
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