Re: Chillies Are the Spice of Life ; Peppers Have Been Found to Kill Cancer Cells. Alice Hart-Davis Discovers That Other Spices Also Get the Lab's Seal of Approval

I'm a big beleiver in Capsacum from first hand experience, so I do not wish to trivialize it's value. Nonetheless, here is some pepper trivia. There is a scale of pepper hotness measurement called Scoville rating. I can't remember for sure, but Scoville may have been the name of the herbalist that devolped this scale along the way of practicing with various of the "hot" peppers for remedy of a whole host of "whatever ails you". How does the the scale work?.

First, there is a spectrum of peppers that contain what is believed to be the critical natural ingredient or, perhaps, group of related ingredients as the ase may be, generally known as Capsacum. This is spelled and or pronounced in various other similar ways, to include Capsicum, Capsaicium, Capsaicin, Capsashum. I think the latter is in part due to big pharma who habitually takes a natural remedy, distills it down to an isolated ingredient and then begins marketing synthesized chemical drugs based on the isolated ingredient, for which they come up with all kinds of synthesized & patented trade names.

At the bottom of the Scoville scale is our friend - the family of "sweet bell peppers". At the top of the scale is the Habanero Pepper. In between are all kinds of various names of hot peppers, some of which may be redundant due to cultural differences between what one culture calls a given species of pepper for which a different culture knows by a different name. This aspect is still a bit confusing to me, but in between the top and bottom of the Scoville Scale, one will find an array of peppers, for instance Chile/Chili various), Cayenne (various), Jalapeno, Toblano, Tabasco, Habanero (various) that may or may not be identical to Scotch Bonnet/African Bird.



Second, Scoville found that some peppers are easier to swallow than others due to the inhernet amount of "heat" residue that may be left upon one's tastebuds. Scoville experimented with diluting various hot poppers with an amount of Sugar water. Ultimately, this is what his scale represents; the amount of dilution that a given pepper needs in order for a person to swallow it such that the sweetness covers up their ability to taste/sense the hotness. The top of the scale where Habanero/Scotch Bonnet/African Bird inhabit, these peppers are rated at over 1/2 million units of hot (that's 500,000 units). At the bottom of the scale is the Bell Pepper rated at 0 (zero) units. Not far up from the bottom is the Jalapeno rated at approximately 3500 to 4500 units. This means that a specimen Habanero pepper needs to be dilluted upwards to 100 times more than a Jalapeno in order to mask the hotness upon swallowing. As far as I know, this only means one will not sense the heat by taste.

Reading into this, I gather that the general idea with this scale is that the higher the units, the more Capsacum (higher concentration) a given pepper has compared to one lower on the scale. The implication here may be that higher concentrations of Capsacum mean more highly effective remedy. If nothing else, next time you find yourself at a rib festival, you can now proudly say you know what that funky looking scale means that gets hung up by the ribroteurs that feature spicey barbequeue.