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Hot Pepper Kills Prostate Cancer
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Thu Mar 16, 2006 09:36 PM
from the cajun-health-food dept.
from the cajun-health-food dept.
brian0918 writes "U.S. and Japanese researchers have announced results of a study showing that capsaicin, the chemical that makes peppers hot, can cause prostate cancer cells to kill themselves. 'Capsaicin led 80 percent of human prostate cancer cells growing in mice to commit suicide in a process known as apoptosis, the researchers said.' This led to tumors one fifth the size of those in untreated mice."
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In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
But it does lead you to ask... (Score:4, Interesting)
Do countries that have generally high capsasin consumption have a lowered incidence of prostate cancer? If one compares countries that eat tons of peppers and ones that don't, if you compensate for age and other factors can you see if there is some kind of correlation?
Very interesting.
Re:In other news... (Score:4, Funny)
The world just keeps getting better and better!
Great... Just Great. (Score:5, Funny)
(I can hear Johnny Cash singing "Ring of Fire"...)
Re:Great... Just Great. (Score:3, Informative)
Fail that remedial biology? Your prostate is nowhere (topologically) near your asshole. Wrong path. It would have to go up and back down again. Large and small intestine vs bladder and urethra. Shorter route would be through y
Re:Great... Just Great. (Score:5, Funny)
Fail that remedial comedy? Your funny bone is nowhere (topologically) near your asshole. But then, I hear there is a great deal of confusion between asses and elbows sometimes.
Remedial anatomy (Score:5, Informative)
A simple correction - your prostate is between your urethra and your rectum [osu.edu]. In fact, the prostate makes most of the liquid in the ejaculate. If your prostate is too large (BPH [urologyhealth.org]), then the the urologist will sometimes do a TURP (also in the BPH article), where the urologist basically goes up your urethra and scoops out heaps of the prostate, in order to free up some space for the poor fellow to relieve himself.
If concern for prostate cancer is raised, a biopsy is done with a terribly evil device [prostatecentre.ca] that goes up the rectum and spears the prostate with six separate little needles. If they left a little capsaicin behind you would be so sore you wouldn't notice...However, the study as reported by the article was simply consumed capsaicin, not topically applied
Re:Great... Just Great. (Score:5, Funny)
Not a big shocker though, a poison in high concentrations caused cancer cells to die
Re:Great... Just Great. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Great... Just Great. (Score:4, Funny)
* Helpful hint: on your first visit to a new restaurant, when they ask you how spicy you want your $FOOD, don't use the phrase "hurt me".
Forget the cells! (Score:5, Funny)
Three to eight... (Score:5, Insightful)
I may be a lightweight bastard, but I cannot eat a single habanero without violently vomiting.
400 mg of Capsaicin is basically like eating pepper spray. Even if it's in capsule pill form you may vomit it up from your stomach. I wonder if there's any way for a local application to the prostate instead of standard ingestion.
Re:Three to eight... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Three to eight... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Three to eight... (Score:5, Funny)
Woman screaming in the middle of the night
Why?
Because cunnilingus is not so fun when the tongue hitting your clit is still swathed in hot sauce that is 100x hotter than anything you can buy at Safeway.
Re:Three to eight... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Three to eight... (Score:4, Funny)
Ginger first, THEN Mary Ann!
Re:Three to eight... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Three to eight... (Score:5, Informative)
Now if your vomiting is from a reaction from something besides taste and burning mouth, you screwed.
Re:Three to eight... (Score:5, Insightful)
Most birds, incidentally, don't have receptors that capsaicin works with, so they can eat peppers all day long and not have a problem.
Birds and capsaicin... (Score:4, Informative)
This property comes in really handy if squirrels start stealing from your birdfeeder. Just mix a healthy dose of cayenne pepper with the birdseed - the squirrels lose interest really fast, but the birds don't even notice. The only trouble is that the cayenne tends to cause the seed to stick together into a big solid mass when it gets damp. Also, refilling, emptying, and cleaning the birdfeeder can become an interesting process when you have clouds of cayenne pepper forming around you!
Sean
Re:Three to eight... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not a doctor or a biologist, but personally, I just don't feel a whole lot of anything in my stomach. You're right, that dosen't mean that capsaicin dosen't have some kind of effect, in fact, I've read that it can stimulate peristalsis in the GI tract and cause the parasympathetic nervous system to release a neurotransmitter which is responsible for lowering blood pressure and later release of endorphines. So, maybe it actually helps with good digestion and lowering blood pressure a bit, it could do much more for all I know... And all of that would indicate that there are at least a few compatible receptors in the stomach/GI tract, like you say. I didn't say there weren't. I've said time and again you couldn't feel it in your stomach, directly.
I was just saying that there's no real evidence that capsaicin does any harm in the stomach, like so many people think. They think eating peppers in quantity is analogous to drinking battery acid. Even the AC that responded to me thinking he knows what goes on was misinformed. So what if it causes more acid, if it does at all? The stomach deals with some nasty ass acid all the time, a little or a lot more won't cause a problem in the stomach, even with weakened mucous lining. Oh, sure, a lot more than normal isn't good for the esophagus, but it's not built to deal with it. It's been proven that almost all stomach ulcers are caused either by bacteria that build a small basic environment in which they can thrive, or by cancer! Acid dosen't hurt a healthy stomach.
Re:Three to eight... (Score:4, Funny)
Great news for my wife! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Great news for my wife! (Score:4, Funny)
Capsaicin - topical analgesic (Score:5, Informative)
is an excellent topical analgesic also for neural problems, like Diabetic neuropathy.
There is a substance P which transmits the pain to the brain. Capsaicin destroys substance
P if you apply it for 4-5 days multiple times a day & hence for the next couple of weeks
you will not have pain, then you have to report it. Instead of the expensive Capsaicin
cream you can also use a paste made at home of red chilli powder etc. Or even McIlhenny's Tabasco [idiom.com]
I have meralgia parasthetic condition & nothing provides relief like chilli paste.
new market... (Score:3, Funny)
Another thing you can do... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Another thing you can do... (Score:5, Funny)
Dammit. Now my peppers taste funny.
Re:Another thing you can do... (Score:5, Funny)
Why even post this here? There won't be case of prostate cancer among the Slashdot crowd for the next 65 fucking years!
Back in 5
Re:Another thing you can do... (Score:5, Funny)
That explains why no one on Slashdot has EVER gotten prostate cancer.
Quick Google Scholar Search (Score:5, Interesting)
The cancer increase was dependent on the concentration of these groups in a county. These results strengthen and extend an earlier case-control study which found odds ratios above 5 for the stomach cancer association with capsaicin pepper. It is further evidence that capsaicin is a human carcinogen.
Thoughts?
Just like the second law of thermodynamics (Score:4, Funny)
Give up.
Re:Quick Google Scholar Search (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Quick Google Scholar Search (Score:4, Informative)
Does this mean that smoking cigarettes will undoubtedly give you cancer, always, in every case? No. Does it mean that avoiding carcinogens will completely safeguard you against it? No. Because the mechanism is still completely random - you could smoke your entire life and never create a particular combination of mutations that causes your cells to divide uncontrollably, or you could get a bad set of transcription errors and end up with cancer anyway. But that doesn't mean you should discount smoking, industrial waste and radiation as health risks simply because we don't know if habanero peppers are slightly carcinogenic or not.
The question is, if rolling a die a thousand times in a specific order would give you a horrible, disfiguring and probably deadly disease, would you rather roll the die 1 billion times, or 100 billion times?
Re:Quick Google Scholar Search (Score:5, Insightful)
Huh? Tofu is pretty much all protein, not carbs.
Anyway, if your conclusion from "we get contradictory info, and we're all going to die someday anyway" is "ignore all the info" that's just another extreme approach that's going to hurt you.
It's like you should probably avoid the extreme diets premised on dubious (or little-explored) studies. But you aren't choosing between that and eating Ho-Hos and pizza for every meal. There's a ton we *do* know about leading a healthy life. Don't spend hours a day counting calories, but get some exercise, avoid the junk food (just don't even bring it home unless you have an iron will), and start eating less if you start getting fat. It's not that hard once you're in the habit, and you'll live a much better life than anyone swinging between the extremes.
About cancer... often it's worth checking into actual incidence rates of different cancers before you make choices of what recommendations you want to ignore. Some carcinogens have a tiny effect. Something like smoking has a pretty huge effect (something like 1 in 19 people get lung cancer in their lives, and 90% of people who die from lung cancer are smokers.. and that's ignoring all of the other health effects of smoking, including other cancers).
In the end, you do have to balance the benefit against the gain, but it IS worth putting some thought into
Yes, freaking out at every headline isn't much use (since many of the reporters don't always seem to understand the actual significance of the studies they're reporting on... they just want the big headline), but that doesn't mean useful info isn't readily available. If you don't want to parse it yourself, talk to your doctor about it.
This clearly demonstrates (Score:5, Funny)
Possible other uses for Pepper Spray.. (Score:3, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Capsaic
"Capsaicin is also the active ingredient in the chemical riot control agent pepper spray. When the spray comes in contact with skin, especially eyes or mucous membranes it is very painful."
Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepper_spray [wikipedia.org]
"Pepper spray (also known as OC spray (from "Oleoresin Capsicum"), OC gas, or capsicum spray) is a lachrymatory agent which is used in riot control, crowd control and personal self-defense, including defense against dogs. It is a non-lethal agent that can be deadly in rare cases. The American Civil Liberties Union claims to have documented fourteen fatalities from the use of pepper spray. The active ingredient in pepper spray is capsaicin, which is a chemical derived from the fruit of plants in the Capsicum genus, including chillis. Long-term effects of pepper spray have not been effectively researched."
Apparently someone was curious.. (Mental image of evil scientist deviously spraying innocent mice with pepper spray while laughing
A a scientist... (Score:4, Interesting)
Big pharma doesn't like the general public knowing that natural compounds present in everyday foods can prevent/treat diseases/conditions that arise later in life due to certain metabolic syndromes/disorders/lifestyles, etc... How else would big pharma demand high prices for its 'miracale/block-buster drugs'?
Since I'm a contract scientist working at Pfizer, and not employed by Pfizer, I feel obligated to tell the truth about some of the secrets hidden by the pharmaceutical industry. Don't read too much into what I've written, I'm not advocating the consumption of alcohol, but drinkning 6-8 ounces of red wine per day will keep high cholesterol and the doctor away, for a long, long time.
Re:A a scientist... (Score:4, Interesting)
Jalapeño suppositories anyone? (Score:5, Funny)
What are the rates in cultures that like hot food? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What are the rates in cultures that like hot fo (Score:4, Interesting)
As soon as I read the article, I did a Google search for prostate cancer and hispanic. I found this page [epnet.com] which states:
Hispanic-American and Native-American men have lower rates of prostate cancer than do white men. Worldwide, the lowest rates of prostate cancer are in Asian countries; the highest rates of prostate cancer are in Northern European countries.
Seems to support the theory!
There be FLAMES shooting out my ass! (Score:5, Funny)
Loving spicy foods pays off! Finally, my wife will have to stop complaining when I aromitize the bedroom in the middle of the night.
"But honey, it's part of my health management program!"
not the whole story (Score:5, Funny)
Some of the mice hung themselves, while some others shot themselves; the scientists still haven't figured out where they got the ropes and guns, which only underlines how painful the treatment is.
Re:Test subjects. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:The wonders of capsules... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Now only if... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:The Treatment. (Score:4, Funny)
Enema Nurse: Too hot?
Patient: No! Too much cilantro!
Re:Yow! (Score:4, Funny)