People like spicy food even though the burn is, as far as your nerves are concerned, a pain signal. There isn’t a single reason. Most of it comes from learning to enjoy a thrill your brain knows is safe, and the rest from personality, genes and the food you grew up with. It’s a subject that’ll divide people who take flavor seriously, and few things split a table faster than hot sauce or Nashville hot chicken. And with hot condiments like sriracha and ingredients like chipotle peppers now everywhere, more people than ever are asking why anyone would choose the burn. Here’s what researchers have found, and which popular explanations don’t hold up.
What happens when you eat a hot pepper?
Capsaicin’s the compound that makes chili peppers hot. It switches on the same sensor in your mouth that detects painful heat. So your brain gets the message it’d get from a burn, even though the food’s temperature hasn’t changed and nothing’s being damaged.
That burn’s there, it seems, to keep mammals away. Birds don’t react to capsaicin at all. In a study of wild chilies, researchers found it put off the rodents that destroy the seeds, but it didn’t discourage the birds that spread them. Other mammals rarely come to like it, either. Paul Rozin, a University of Pennsylvania psychologist, has studied this for decades. He found that dogs and pigs in a Mexican village ate chili-laced scraps every day and still never developed a preference. We’re close to alone in seeking the burn out.
Is it the thrill?
The leading explanation’s what Rozin calls benign masochism: enjoying an experience that the body reads as a threat while the mind knows there’s no real danger. It’s the same bargain you make on a roller coaster or with a sad movie. Chili burn’s one of his clearest examples, and he notes that well over 2 billion adults enjoy it.
His research also found that people’s favorite level tends to be just below the most they can stand. That fits the thrill idea. The fun’s in getting close to the edge without going over it. It’s a lot like skydiving or bungee jumping, just on a smaller scale.
You’ll often hear that the burn triggers a rush of adrenaline or endorphins, and that this is what hooks people. The evidence for both isn’t strong. One small study did find higher adrenaline in the blood after a very hot meal, but nothing shows that’s why we enjoy chili. And Rozin has said nobody’s been able to measure endorphins well enough to know whether they matter. He also points out that if a chemical reward were behind it, he’d expect animals to get hooked the same way people do.
Does your personality play a part?
It looks that way. Researchers at Penn State found that people who enjoy spicy food score higher on sensation seeking, the trait behind liking intense or novel experiences, and on sensitivity to reward. Sensation seeking tracked how much they liked spicy food, but it didn’t track how much they liked bland control foods.
The two traits don’t work the same way for everyone. In a follow-up study, sensitivity to reward was more closely tied to spicy food liking and eating in men, and sensation seeking was more closely tied to it in women. The authors suggest men may respond more to outside rewards, and women more to the sensation itself.
Is a love of spicy food learned?
Mostly, yes. Almost nobody likes chili the first time. In Rozin’s research in Mexico, eating gradually increasing amounts of chili was enough on its own for a liking to develop. He’s said the children there started liking it at about 4 or 5. So if you grew up in a home where spicy food was eaten all the time, you’re more likely to enjoy it as an adult.
You might’ve heard that the habit can start even earlier, with what your mom ate while she was pregnant. Babies do learn some flavors that way, and that’s well documented. In one well-known study, infants whose mothers drank carrot juice during pregnancy or breastfeeding made fewer negative faces at carrot-flavored cereal. But that’s a flavor, and the burn’s a pain signal. German researchers fed nursing mothers a curry with chili, and chili’s pungent compounds didn’t show up in their milk. We couldn’t find any study showing that babies learn to like the burn before birth, either.
Is it in your genes?
Partly, and it’s been studied in twins. In a study of young Finnish twins, genes explained somewhere between 18% and 58% of the differences in how pleasant people found spicy heat. The rest came down to environment, and that’s everything above. (Genes in this case affect the liking, which isn’t the same thing as how much heat you can take.)
Your taste sensitivity’s part of it too. People who find the bitter compound PROP very bitter, often called supertasters, tend to rate the burn of capsaicin as more intense. To them, the same pepper’s simply hotter. It’s a bit like cilantro, which some people find deeply unpleasant while others truly enjoy it.
Can you train yourself to like it?
Spicy heat’s a taste you acquire, like black coffee and whiskey, and you can train yourself to enjoy more of it by eating it regularly. Start with a mild pepper like a banana pepper and work your way up gradually to a hot one like a habanero. We’ve covered how to build your spicy food tolerance step by step.
What’s less clear is whether regular eaters feel less burn. The Penn State team found no link between how often people ate chili and how strong the burn felt to them. And Rozin found that chili lovers aren’t numb to it. In one small study, regular users were even better at telling burn levels apart than non-users. So building a tolerance seems to be more about learning to like the burn. It isn’t so much about feeling it less. Some people do it because they see enjoying spicy food as a sign of toughness, while others just want to add a new dimension to their food.
Did spicy food start as a way to keep food safe?
That’s one of the most famous theories. Capsaicin can kill some microbes in lab tests. And a 1998 study of thousands of meat recipes from 36 countries found that spices were used more in hotter climates, where food spoils faster. A follow-up by the same team found that vegetable dishes called for fewer spices than meat dishes in every one of those countries. That’d fit the idea that meat needs more protecting.
But a larger 2021 analysis found that temperature doesn’t explain how much spice a cuisine uses once you account for which cuisines are related to each other. Neighboring and related cuisines tend to be spicy together. Spice use was more closely tied to poverty and health than to climate. So the food-safety theory’s far from settled.
Why is spicy food more popular than ever?
Exposure’s got a lot to do with it. Americans now have greater access to foods from all over the world than ever before, and you’ll find Thai and Indian food even in parts of the U.S. where spicy food isn’t part of the traditional diet. The same goes for Europe, where Indian and Mexican restaurants are easy to find in major cities. And since liking chili’s learned, more chances to try it mean more people who end up loving it.
Get the free PepperScale Scoville Heat Chart
A printable, at-a-glance ranking of 25 chilies from sweet to scorching — with the jalapeño and Carolina Reaper as your reference points. Join the newsletter and we’ll send it straight to your inbox.
No spam — just Wicked Wednesday recipes and occasional extra dashes of chili pepper inspiration. Unsubscribe anytime.
Related reading
- Craving Spicy Food? What Makes Us Want It and Why: What’s going on when you can’t stop thinking about the burn.
- What Is The Scoville Scale?: How that burn gets measured, from bell peppers to the superhots.
- The Hot Pepper List: Find your next step up, with more than 170 peppers you can sort by heat.