AT THE Quaker Steak & Lube in Erie, Pennsylvania, a man sits down for an unusual and dangerous meal. He signs a half-page legal document releasing the restaurant from any liability. A crowd gathers around the diner and a waitress places a small carton before him. In it sits a brown chicken wing drenched in sauce – an Atomic Wing. Before he even takes a bite, the man’s eyes start to water, and he turns his head away to breathe. Turning back, he grabs the wing and rips off half of it with his teeth. Beads of sweat pop out on his flushed forehead. The ordeal has begun.
I’ve witnessed this scene several times, and the effect is always the same. I have even eaten an Atomic Wing, though I wouldn’t advise it – it’s so spicy that it hurts. So why do it?
There’s the sheer bravado, of course, and the lure of a certain kind of fame. If you eat 10 Atomic Wings, your name is posted forever at the restaurant. And if you can take the heat, there may be health benefits that go beyond clearing the sinuses and releasing endorphins. The findings are far from clear-cut, but there is tentative evidence that eating hot food might ward off cancer and other deadly diseases.
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Inspired by the heroics at the Quaker Steak & Lube, I resolved to go one better. I would track down the Bhut Jolokia or “ghost chilli”, recently crowned the world’s hottest pepper, and see if it’s all that. Its current home is New Mexico State University’s Chile Pepper Institute in Las Cruces, which has been growing, testing and selling chillies for more than 100 years. “Chilli is part of our culture,” says Paul Bosland, head of the institute. “It permeates the entire state.”
Chilli peppers were domesticated more than 6000 years ago in what is now Latin America. In the 15th century Christopher Columbus sailed in search of peppercorns, but found chillies instead. Later the Portuguese took them to Asia, where they spread like wildfire. Now they are indispensable ingredients in any respectable kitchen.
The key to their heat is capsaicin, a compound found only in chilli peppers. It can be synthesised, but the best way to get it is by extracting it from chillies. Pure capsaicin is colourless, odourless and tasteless. It is the main ingredient in pepper spray. It also has well-established health benefits: millions of people rub capsaicin-based creams onto their skin to alleviate arthritis and muscle pain.
Capsaicin is most often encountered in spicy food. The compound tricks the body into thinking it’s hot when it’s not: when capsaicin encounters nerve cells that detect heat and pain it triggers an inflammatory response, releasing neurotransmitters that lead to pain and swelling. The more capsaicin, the more neurotransmitter is released.
So how did the world’s hottest chilli get to Las Cruces? In 2000, reports arrived from the Assam region of north-east India suggesting that the Indian Defence Research Laboratory in Tezpur had found a chilli with a rating of 855,000 Scoville heat units – the arcane scale by which such things are measured. That put it ahead of the reigning champion Red Savina Habanero, which rated a mere 577,000 (see Chart). No samples were available for testing, however, and the matter remained in doubt.
The following year, Bosland travelled to India and tracked down some seeds to a local market. Back at his lab in New Mexico, it took several seasons for Bosland to breed enough chillies for testing. His efforts were rewarded last February when he the official notification from Guinness World Records that he had the world’s hottest chilli – coming in at a staggering 1,001,304 Scoville units.
What good is such a scorching chilli? Some researchers think high doses of capsaicin might help treat cancer. In April 2007, a team from the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute in Pennsylvania reported that they had grafted human pancreatic cancer cells into mice and injected them with capsaicin. The amount was equivalent to a person eating one spicy Indian meal per day. After three to five days of treatment per week, the tumours on the capsaicin-treated mice were about half the size of the tumours on the control mice.
The researchers found that capsaicin induced cell death, or apoptosis, in cancer cells through a variety of mechanisms. Levels of Bax, a protein that triggers apoptosis, were higher in the mice treated with capsaicin. While the cancer cells died, normal human cells were unaffected. The key lies in the mitochondria, says lead researcher Sanjay Srivastava, now at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. When increased levels of Bax move into the mitochondria of cancerous cells, the membrane wall around the mitochondrion weakens, releasing a protein that is soon followed by cell death. Srivastava hopes to begin clinical trials within five years.
Meanwhile, a team from the University of California, Los Angeles, tested mice with prostate cancer. When they were given large doses of capsaicin – equivalent to a human eating 10 habanero peppers three times a week – 80 per cent of the cancer cells died, and the remaining tumours were about one-fifth the size of those of the untreated mice (). “It wouldn’t be surprising to see an effect overnight,” says lead researcher Phillip Koeffler, director of haematology and oncology at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.
Don’t spice up your food too much just yet, though: it could do you more harm than good. Studies in the 1990s were inconclusive as to whether eating large amounts of peppers caused stomach cancer or helped to prevent it. What’s more, capsaicin can worsen heartburn and abdominal pain. Although there are no known cases of chilli-induced deaths, the concentration of capsaicin in commercially available sauces can be extreme, and some people may suffer allergic reactions. “It’s only a matter of time before someone dies from eating these incredibly hot sauces,” says Dave DeWitt, author of 31 books on chilli peppers.
So why breed ridiculously spicy chillies? “Why do people climb Everest?” says Bosland. “Because we can.” To get a really spicy pepper, he says, you have to stress the plant – deprive it of water, grow it in extreme heat, bring it to the brink of death – and then pick it. What doesn’t kill a chilli makes it more potent.
And while a chilli won’t kill me, it can make me feel like I’m about to die. Bosland kindly delivered me a dozen dried samples of Bhut Jolokia. They looked like elongated sun-dried tomatoes: red, shrivelled and desiccated. They didn’t burn to the touch or have a strong scent. This was the moment of truth: I started by biting off one-third of a pepper. It tasted like rice paper at first, crunchy but with a slight chewiness. A few seconds later I felt it burning and promptly swallowed.
Big mistake. Immediately the back of my throat caught fire. I opened my mouth to breathe, and it was like blowing oxygen onto hot coals. I breathed through my nose but couldn’t get enough air. As I paced the room, gasping fiery breaths, my eyes watered, pressure built behind my ears, and my adrenalin level rose. Speaking for more than a few seconds was impossible. Soon I was alternating ice cream and ice water to soothe my burning throat. It took a good 15 minutes for the worst of the effects to pass, leaving me light-headed and a little weak, as if I had just sprinted a lap around a track.
Eating the Bhut Jolokia was as painful as advertised, but I rather enjoyed the short-lived high. I can’t vouch for any health effects just yet. But I might have another one soon…
