This is the chef's kiss of scientific discovery
Australian National University
It's
a question many have chewed the fat over. And now thanks to new research from
The Australian National University (ANU) we have an answer.
The
quick takeaway is: probably not.
Professor
Lindell Bromham and her colleagues asked why hot countries across the world
tend to have spicy food? This pattern has led to what some have termed
"Darwinian gastronomy" -- a tummy-led cultural evolutionary process
in countries with hotter climates.
To
find out the answer to their question, the researchers feasted on a true
smorgasbord of data, examining more the 33,000 recipes from 70 cuisines
containing 93 different spices.
"The theory is that spicy foods helped people survive in hot climates where the risk of infection from food can have a big cost in terms of health and survival," Professor Bromham said.
"But
we found that this theory doesn't hold up.
"Spicier
food is found in hotter countries, but our analysis provides no clear reason to
believe that this is primarily a cultural adaptation to reducing infection risk
from food."
The
study instead shows that while use of spice is related to the risk of foodborne
illness, it's also associated with a wide range of health outcomes. In fact,
spice use is even related to causes of death that have nothing to do with
infection risk, such as fatal car accidents.
"So
there is a significant relationship between life expectancy and spicy
food," Professor Bromham said.
"But
this doesn't mean that spicy food shortens your life span or makes you crash
your car. Instead, there are many socioeconomic indicators that all scale
together, and many of them also scale with spice use."
Professor
Bromham said that because the spiciness of cuisines scales with many
socio-economic factors, like gross domestic product per capita and life
expectancy, it is difficult to tease apart the key causes. However, the
researchers could rule out some possible explanations of why some areas use
more spices in their cooking.
"Spicier
foods are not explained by variation in climate, human population density or
cultural diversity," she said.
"And
patterns of spice use don't seem to be driven by biodiversity, nor by the
number of different crops grown, nor even by the number of spices growing
naturally in the area."
Whatever
the key drivers for the use of spice, one thing is certain -- our palettes and
plates are a lot better for it!
The
study's findings are published in Nature Human Behaviour.
