Taste refers to the sensation produced by direct chemical stimulation of our taste buds. The taste cells present on our taste buds sense the stimulation of taste and smell together to synthesize our sense of taste in the brain.

The tastes that human taste buds can feel are limited. According to the standards recognized by the academic community, there are six kinds of sweet, sour, bitter, spicy and fresh tastes. For each basic taste, you can find a corresponding taste that can be felt. The "fat smell" of the stimulating sensor was not confirmed by American scientists until 2015.

The mechanism that produces the feeling of "spicy" is completely different from the mechanism that produces the other five basic tastes above. Therefore, understanding why spicy food is a "pain" will also help us find ways to truly and effectively "relieve spicy food".

How does the "spicy" feeling come about?

The active ingredient that makes peppers spicy is called capsaicin (trans-8-methyl-N-vanillyl-6-nonenamide), which is irritating to mammals, including humans, and can Produces a burning sensation in the mouth. Of course, there are other substances that can produce similar effects, such as zingiberone and gingerol contained in ginger.

The feeling of spiciness is produced by capsaicin and other receptors acting on the pain fibers of the tongue. This pathway is actually a pain transmission pathway, not a taste transmission pathway. Therefore, from a neuroscientific perspective, spicy food is actually a kind of pain. To explain in more popular terms, capsaicin causes us to feel bursts of burning pain by stimulating the pain nerves in our taste buds. This is where the spicy feeling comes from.

At the same time, because the sensor that can sense capsaicin is also a receptor that senses temperature, when it is activated, it will produce a burning sensation almost like touching boiling water, so we have the feeling of "spicy and hot". "hot" feeling. In this sense, the feeling of "spicy" is more like the illusion that we feel "hot", and then the brain instructs the body to make a series of stress reactions, such as sweating, blushing, runny nose, tears, etc.

How to effectively relieve spicy food?

If you understand how the "spicy" feeling occurs, you will understand that the key to a truly effective way to relieve spicy food is to relieve the effects of capsaicin and other irritating substances on pain receptors on taste buds.