Stories tagged curry

You're being a little dramatic: That's what I think, anyway.
Courtesy pjryan3“I don’t know, mate. I was just walking down the street thinking ‘Oy! It’s been a long time since I’ve had burning diarrhea!’ And then I saw the sign at the Cinnamon Club: hottest curry in the world. It was like God gave me a gift card for free burning diarrhea!”

“I had some bad chicken in Bath last week, and was fortunate enough to end up with sever stomach pain and vomiting. But with five days left in my vacation, it seemed like I was done with the puking. What a rip off! I’ve been planning this trip for years, and I didn’t come to England not to be physically ill the whole time. Thank goodness for naga peppers!”

“‘Grossly visible gastric bleeding’? Where’s the queue?!”

Brits and tourists alike were thrilled last week by the opportunity to try a London restaurant’s Bollywood Burner curry, a dish that will likely be named by the Guinness Book of World Records as the planet’s hottest curry.

(The meal, apparently, isn’t in quite the same league as Venutian gonad-exploding curry.)

The curry (which is “too extreme to keep on the menu”) gets its heat from the naga jolokia pepper, which was recently declared to be the hottest pepper in town (that is to say, again, on the planet). The naga has a maximumScoville rating of over one million—more than one hundred times hotter than the jalapeño pepper.

Capsaicin, the chemical that gives peppers their spicy dreams and hot flashes, has been explored as a treatment for chronic pain, and has been shown to kill cancer cells in lab rats. Ironically, capsaicin also causes severe pain, and has been shown to be associated with stomach cancer.

Tags : diarrhea, curry, chilli peppers, capsaicin, food, spice, spicy

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Food of the gods—and good for you, too!: An ingredient in curry has cancer-fighting properties. Photo by yajico at Flickr.com

I love Indian food! The hotter, the better. My friend Bruce and I used to walk into random restaurants in the Los Angeles area and order the spiciest thing on the menu. Our motto was: it’s not really food if it doesn’t hurt.

Well, now it turns out that all those years I was downing rogan josh and chicken vindaloo, I was actually ingesting a potent cancer-fighting agent! According to some studies, curcumin, the yellowish spice in turmeric that gives curry its flavor, suppresses tumors. Unfortunately, it quickly loses its cancer-fighting properties when eaten.

But now, researchers in Japan have developed two synthetic versions of the compound. In tests on mice, these artificial flavorings were up to 30 times more powerful than natural curcumin. Treated mice fared 40% to 50% better than non-treated mice.

IMPORTANT NOTICE: Every time we post a story about cancer or other serious diseases, we get a flood of messages asking for information. We are not doctors. No one on Science Buzz is qualified to give medical advice. Synthetic curcumin is still in early trials, and won’t be ready for human use for several years, if ever. Eating natural curcumin will not – I repeat, will NOT – protect you from cancer nor cure cancer you already have.

Tags : cancer, curry, health, Indian food

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