Cayenne & Red Chilli: All Hot Facts

The problem this book solves

Ask for chilli powder in three countries and you will be handed three different products. In the United States it is a mild Tex-Mex blend with cumin and oregano in it. In Britain and India it is pure ground chilli, several times hotter. And on the same shelf sits paprika, made from the same botanical species as cayenne, that adds colour and almost no heat at all.

None of this is anybody’s fault. It is what happens when one plant, Capsicum annuum, is bred in a hundred directions and each tradition names the result after itself.

The cost is real, though. It is why a curry comes out bland, why a pot of chilli comes out salty, and why “add chilli powder to taste” is useless advice when the jars differ by a factor of forty.

What makes it different

Every claim carries an evidence grade, shown inline, so you can see the strength of the support without leaving the sentence:

• S — Strong: supported by human clinical studies
• P — Preliminary: early or small human data
• V — Lab: cell or animal work, mechanism only
• T — Traditional: historical use, not clinically proven

Chilli is an unusual case for that grading, because its strongest evidence belongs to a form almost nobody thinks of as a spice: capsaicin applied to the skin, which is a licensed pain treatment in several countries and has the trials to justify it. The claims made for swallowing it — the metabolism, the fat burning, the circulation — are real in the lab, small in the body, and heavily oversold in the capsule aisle.

This book states what each amount was in the trial, every time — and never tells you what yours should be.