An Ohio State University researcher ironically found hints of a molecular compound in chili peppers that could help cool meals that may be too hot to handle.
Sometimes you bite into buffalo wings for Sunday football that are too spicy or find that Indian vindaloo curry you order at a restaurant lights your taste buds on fire a little too much. Ohio State University researcher and professor of food science and technology Devin Peterson said he is researching an "anti-spice" condiment to help solve these issues.
Peterson told WOSU spicy foods are something he's come to enjoy in his life, but he did grow up in the Midwest, where he said that was different.
"As a young boy, salt and pepper were my spice," Peterson said.
Peterson said a potential condiment could be created from the same chemicals that give peppers their spice. He said this could be especially beneficial for someone with children who complain about the heat of their food, something he's personally encountered.
Peterson said that, like how people turn to ranch, blue cheese, or something high in fat to dull spicy food, research shows that the chemical capsaicin could break down the spiciness. Peterson said receptors for that spice can dampen the receptors that govern that perception.
"It would just take that heat down a couple notches and perhaps provide ability to customize it to really what you were trying to target. And so it's kind of hard to do that otherwise," Peterson said.
Peterson said any product made from this research could be powders sprinkled on food. The testing found that patients didn't taste or perceive the compound when it was added to food.
Peterson, who is the director of the Flavor Research and Education Center at OSU, said he researches attributes of food and how things like the pungency, or heat, of chili peppers affect the desirability of cuisines. He also works with companies that try and understand the science around the flavor industry and possibly create some products out of that research.
"So part of what we're trying to do is... as we're making healthier options, how do I make them less difficult to eat," Peterson said. "How do (people) understand things that are aversive or things that are disliked, maybe things that are liked as well, and provide better guidance for them."
The researchers first added the standardized powders to tomato juice and asked a trained tasting panel to gauge their pungency.
“They’re all in the same base and all normalized, so they should have had a similar heat perception, but they didn’t,” Peterson said. “That is a pretty clear indication that other things were at play and impacting the perception.”
A second round of tasters then compared the pungency of a range of capsaicinoid samples from peppers mixed with varying levels of these compounds during tests in which different samples were placed on each side of the tongue simultaneously.
Peterson said he works with a broad range of ingredient companies and other companies in the food industry that could benefit from this research.
Peterson said this research could also lead to breakthroughs in pain relief, especially for cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy. Peterson said the same receptors that suppress the pungency of peppers or suppress burn or pain could also be a pain-relief alternative to counteract the effects of pain from chemo.
"It causes a lot of the same receptors to be triggered and sensing pain throughout the body," Peterson said. "And if these molecules we can demonstrate in the oral cavity suppress these receptors, in other words, they dampen their signaling or the perception of burn, then they potentially could have this application as well."
Peterson's research can be read in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.
