Back in the spring, George and I started working on a video about the chemistry
of building tolerance to spicy peppers. We decided to eat part of a raw serrano pepper
every day to see if we could build our tolerance in a really short window of time.
Oh my God, this is awful. That sucked. Was not fun. Not fun, but then the pandemic hit.
Cloth masks could help. SARS-CoV-2 can make your innate immune system. So unfortunately we had to
stop doing that. But those painful memories got me thinking, is there a good cure for that? Like, is
there something that you could eat or drink that would instantly remove the heat and cool you down?
Yeah. Yeah. You could just have a nice tall glass of milk. I mean, that's,
that's the best thing, right, Sam? George. Oh, right. You’re super lactose intolerance. Uh,
that must suck. Never able to drink a glass of milk or fresh cheese or, um, well,
ice cream. I mean, you got coffee, ice cream, you got vanilla ice cream, you got your chocolate...
So anyway, I needed something lactose-free that could relieve the heat.
And I didn't care about lactose. All I wanted was to find the best possible cure,
which I had always heard was milk, but I ended up finding something better. More on that later.
To stop the burn, I wanted to first figure out how it works. So I did a little research. When you eat
something spicy, capsaicin will bind to your TRPV1 receptors. So TRPV1 receptors are proteins that
are on some of your pain receptor cells. And when they're activated by capsaicin, a signal is sent
up to your brain that your brain then translates to I'm in a lot of pain. TRPV1 also detects
actual heat. And so it can be activated at temperatures above 109 degrees Fahrenheit.
And TRPV1 Isn't just in your mouth. It's in your digestive tract, your skin, your eyes,
it's all over the place. Remember that time you chopped a bunch of peppers and
then forgot to wash your hands before rubbing your eyes. Thank TRPV1. So what
we really need is something that can remove capsaicin from theTRPV1 receptor entirely.
Capsaicin is a nonpolar molecule like oil. It's not going to dissolve in water, which means
water won't wash it away all that well. Milk is supposedly the best thing for beating the heat.
And I'd always heard that it was because the fats in it that are nonpolar can actually clear out the
capsaicin, but is that really true? We wanted to see if we could test a few different variables--
protein, fat, and temperature to see if we could come up with the best cure for hot pepper burn.
And I had the added challenge of doing it without lactose. So we did an experiment.
I can't say I'm excited to do this, frankly. No,
I'm going to cry. Obviously every time I've been like snotting and crying everywhere.
This is gonna be really bad. All right. Let's do it. All right. Here we go.
Uh, George is going to vom.
Cheese? Yeah. Cheese.
I can’t even chew it.
Oh, I can put it all over my tongue.
Oh no. Oh God.
I just have...an overwhelming urge to throw up. And the cheese made it worse.
How was your cheese? How was your cheese?
It's helping a little. Is it really gross that I'm like gargling cheese right now?
I'm very sweaty. Can you see the light shine on my face?
Look at this. Andrew don't put this in the video! Here we go. Let's do it. Yeah.
Okay. I think I'm past the vomit stage.
Skim. Almond beverage.
Okay. All right. The milk actually really helps.
This helped way less than I thought it was going to.
Okay. I think I can do this again.
Let's do it.
I'm going for the soy beverage. Okay. I’ll go for the milk. Oh, thank God.
Oh, this is, this is great. That helped a lot. There was no difference for me between
skim and whole milk. Well, Sam, there comes a time when...
This is gonna suck. All right. I'm going for it.
Yeah. My tongue is on fire. I don't know. I'm surprised. I was thinking this was gonna…. Ohhh.
It's not an absurd number of seeds.
Yeah. That seems highly reasonable. If not, borderline would be, please continue.
All right. Ice cream.
Oh my God.
Uh-huh. Yeah. This is the way to go. Oh my God. This is so much better than any of the others.
All right. I'm going to do it. Feeling it. Um, Hmm.
That feels nice. Also delicious. How's it doing it? The heat it's almost gone.
It's almost entirely gone. That was so good. Have you been eating ice cream this whole time?
I'm about halfway through. Oh wow. George. I would say
almond beverage is the worst followed by plant-based protein shake, then cheese. So I think
the best one would be the coconut frozen dessert. So the coconut based fake ice cream.
My ranking is Brie is by far the worst, this made me want to throw up more. Then the
milks were pretty much tied. I’ve got skim and whole, it didn't make too much of a difference.
And by far in the lead was the ice cream. Like I've eaten half of this pints.
And, um, I feel nothing in my mouth now. So this is, that was like,
perfect for me. Alright right. This was fun. This was not fun, but I appreciate them. You get it.
Is it fat? Well, George found that skim and whole milk seemed to perform about the same, which would
suggest that that is not the only factor in why milk seems to work so well. And I actually found
some research from about a year ago, showing the same thing. Skim milk, and whole milk aren't all
that different. So maybe it's protein. That might make sense, but the plant-based protein
shake I had was terrible. It did almost nothing for me, but maybe there's something specific
about the proteins in cow's milk, like casein that helps with the capsaicin heat.
Some research has indicated that casein can actually remove capsaicin from the TRPV1 receptor,
but it's not super straightforward. So TBD on that research. In the end, I found that coconut
frozen dessert was by far the best and it's dairy free. So no casein, but it has a lot of
fat and is really cold. We talked about how TRPV1 can be activated by heat, but cold temperatures
can actually block its activity. That's pretty cool. So if you dip your trip in the wrong salsa,
we highly recommend ordering some fatty lactose-free frozen dessert product or
some ice cream. I also highly recommended, never agreeing to do a video with Sam. Wait, George.
I think that frozen butter would actually work better than ice cream. So let's do another round.
Having a rough year. You're not alone. We're all trying to make sense of 2020. That's why
we think you should check out. Self-Evident a new show hosted by our friends, Danielle Bainbridge,
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