Hot pepper health tips to keep you fit in 2009

We a Darn Hot Peppers are always looking for another reason to get people eatin’ peppers so keep checking back often if you’re feeling like you need some ammo to get a buddy or family member on the chile bandwagon.

• Any good chilehead knows that capsaicin is the stuff that makes our tongues burn but did you know it also drives prostate cancer cells to kill themselves! At least that’s what scientists said in the March 15th issue of Cancer Research.
• Six millennia ago, farmers living in modern-day Mexico made a wise health move: They domesticated the chili pepper.
• Capsaicin, the compound that gives red pepper its heat, could inhibit the growth of fat cells, says a new laboratory study.
• A new hot-chili-pepper-based anesthetic may offer better pain relief during childbirth, surgery, or other painful situations than conventional anesthetics.
• Harvard University researchers are mixing capsaicin with another anesthetic in hopes of developing epidurals that wouldn’t confine women to bed during Childbirth, or dental injections that don’t numb the whole mouth. And at the National Institutes of Health, scientists hope early next year to begin testing in advanced Cancer patients a capsaicin cousin that is 1,000 times more potent, to see if it can zap their intractable pain.