Natural High: Capsaicin

I love food.  Yes food is delicious but it's also powerful.  Food can kill you or heal you.  Everyday scientists discover new and crazy ways that foods help or harm us.  I love reading about the powerful effects food has on our bodies so I'm adding a section to my blog called Natural High.  Here I'm going to focus on a specific foods, supplements, herbs, vitamins, and minerals and how science thinks they work in our bodies.  Today I want to talk about one of my all time favorites, capsaicin.  Capsaicin is the stuff in red pepper that makes it burn. The powerful thing about capsaicin is that it makes your brain think your hot even though your not; capsaicin makes you sweat.  When your hot you burn calories.  I love the taste of spicy foods so eating cayenne and peppers is no problem for me.  If your a weaker tongued person you can take cayenne pills.  There are even "cool" cayenne pills that have less capsaicin so if you aren't used to it you won't burn your bottom.  Yes thats right, not only does capsaicin burn on the way in, it can burn on the way out.  So if you'd like to supplement with capsaicin I suggest starting out slow to see how it works on you.  There are tons of studies that have been done on capsaicin so feel free to google it and read about it's other promising abilities (like pain relief, sinus congestion relief, and ulcer treatment).