Hot sauces – most of us like a little kick every once and awhile, and entire civilizations make an art out of these jammed chili pepper concoctions. Indian food employs chili peppers and derivatives of said peppers extensively in curries, Mexican culture employs both peppers and hot sauces in its cuisine, and many African-American foods require some degree of spiciness to be reckoned remotely authentic. So what actually happens when you bite into a delicious bit of food with some hot sauce dotted on it to produce such a reaction from your taste buds – and other regions of your body?

A burning mouth and lips; a clearing of mucose along nasal passages and other mucus membranes; sweating; and other symptoms can result when a diner takes a bite of anything which has too much capsaicin – which is the primary culprit in what makes hot sauces and hot peppers have that trademark burn to them. The chemical capsaicin, although completely non-aromatic and colorless in pure form, is extremely toxic to most mammals (this is considered to be an evolutionary reaction, since the berries in which this chemical is establish does not effect birds at all – so that they can carry seeds of these plants without harm). If you have ever taken a bite of something way too hot, you know that water doesn’t assistance – it usually makes the burning worse. So what to do?

If you are consuming and you discover that one of the hot sauces or peppers that you have eaten up is merely too hot, you can do a match of things to stop the burning sensation. The easiest method to effectively end the burning is to drink cold milk – bc of the casein present in animal milk, the capsaicin is moderately neutralized. Another way to rapidly repress your pain is to drink room temperature, sugary water – this will also neutralize the pain.

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