Combining spicy foods with mint boosts anti-inflammatory effects 100x or more

The in-vitro caveat is the key issue here. The "100x" figure refers to inflammatory marker measurements in isolated mouse macrophage cell cultures, a setup where compounds are applied directly to cells at controlled concentrations. Oral supplementation involves digestion, absorption, metabolism, and distribution to tissues that make those in-vitro concentrations essentially unreachable.

Taking capsaicin and peppermint supplements together is unlikely to cause harm, but you're not replicating the study conditions. The in-vitro result is interesting as a mechanistic signal. It suggests a possible interaction pathway worth investigating, but it doesn't provide dosing guidance for humans.

This gap between study type and real-world applicability is exactly why I built vital-stack.com for supplement interactions in my database, I surface the study type and mechanism alongside the conclusion, so you can judge how much weight to give it.

ChrisMarshallNY• 3 months ago

So ... mint chutney, anyone?

tecoholic• 3 months ago

My man. Why stop at chutney, when you can go all the way to Briyani (the south indian kind)

cmxch• 3 months ago

Or melange, if we’re talking about Herbert’s Dune series.

aappleby2• 3 months ago

The article title is super misleading - this is about measurements of inflammatory markers in vitro and explicitly does not generalize to food intake.

mutagen• 3 months ago

It is also missing the "in Mice" part of the headline.

https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/18/3/376

Functional Phytochemicals Cooperatively Suppress Inflammation in RAW264.7 Cells

RAW 264.7 cells are a mouse macrophage cell line commonly used in research to study immune responses, inflammation, and cancer.

ngriffiths• 3 months ago

In mice, but not even real mice. That's a new one!

dlcarrier2• 3 months ago

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1217/

msuniverse20262• 3 months ago

Pretty interesting. In homeopathy mint is considered one of the most potent antidoting substances which is something that neutralises or cancels the action of another homeopathic remedy. Maybe a comment like this activates chimp brain downvote circuits in HNers but a lot of medicines start from these folk traditions and then make their way into regular medicine.

krior2• 3 months ago

Homeopathy is not a "folk" tradition, it is simply an insane concept.

halflife4• 3 months ago

I once sat next to a mint plant and it cured my cold, the farther I sat the better I felt. Obviously diluted mint particles in the air cured me.

msuniverse20262• 3 months ago

and yet it moves :^)

zdragnar• 3 months ago

There's tons of folk remedies that do absolutely nothing useful at all, too. When you don't have any reliable medicine, you take whatever you have on hand and hope for a placebo effect. Eventually, you find something helpful because even a broken clock is right twice a day.

There are recorded beliefs in medieval Germany, for instance, that carrying or wearing an eye from a bat will make you invisible.

halflife4• 3 months ago

How about blowing smoke up ones ass? https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

lapetitejort3• 3 months ago

Can you give an example of a well-known homeopathic and/or folk remedy that has been adopted into regular medicine, maybe in the last 20-50 years?

rkomorn2• 3 months ago

I think the closest one ("but no cigar") might be oscillococcinum, but its popularity isn't due to doctors recommending it (because they don't, by and large).

ksymph• 3 months ago

The premise is asymmetrical. One could just as easily ask "Which regular medicine has been adopted as a folk remedy?", to which the answer of course is largely no. There is also a (purely pedantic) argument to be made that folk remedies are more 'regular', though assuming the question here is "Are folk remedies widely prescribed in their original forms by typical modern-day MDs?", the answer, again, is largely no.

Now, to the question "Which folk medicines have a fairly robust (or at least promising) clinical basis?", there are certainly some: ginger[0], turmeric[1], honey[2], psilocybin[3], and of course capsaicin and peppermint. Not to mention sunshine, exercise, and meditation, all of which have traditional origins.

Taking a step back though, historically, pharmaceutical drugs have often been derived from natural remedies with bases in folk remedies. The pipeline from traditional medicine -> scientific study -> molecular isolation -> synthesis and mechanized production is pretty well-trodden. Aspirin comes from willow bark, morphine comes from opium, quinine (malaria treatment) comes from cinchona bark, paclitaxel (cancer treatment) comes from yew bark.

Homeopathy is BS though, no argument there. GP really shouldn't put it in the same bucket as folk medicine (it's not even particularly old).

[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9654013/

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36804260/

[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37447382/

[3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35225143/

hammock• 3 months ago

Turmeric. Honey (on burns)- Medihoney was even used in a recent Pitt episode. Aspirin, though this is older than 50 years.

gib444• 3 months ago

Obligatory Mitchell and Webb https://youtube.com/watch?v=HMGIbOGu8q0

nkrisc• 3 months ago

What’s the physical basis for that?

adzm• 3 months ago

Folk medicine and remedies are one thing; traditional and herbal medicine certainly has its place and is understudied.

Homeopathy however is pure nonsense even on a fundamental scientific level.

It is unfortunate that the two get conflated.

roughly2• 3 months ago

This is one of the things that’s deeply challenging for biology and biochemistry - it’s extremely resistant to the sort of reductionism that works so well for other fields. It’s rare to find a single compound, a single species, or a single pathway that’s responsible enough for an effect to show up in studies of the sort of power that one can muster without a ton of time and money, and as soon as you try to capture synergistic effects, you hit a combinatorial wall quickly. In microbiology, for instance, colonies of different bacterial species are the norm, not the exception, and metabolic pathways that span multiple species are common to the point that trying to isolate a given species’ contribution can miss the effect entirely.

the_real_cher3• 3 months ago

Hopefully AI can help us parse some of these massive data sets and interactions.

Den_VR• 3 months ago

metabolic pathways that span multiple species are common to the point that trying to isolate a given species’ contribution can miss the effect entirely.

What does this mean?

0cf8612b2e1e• 3 months ago

I think author is saying that you ingest compound A, microbe 1 eats A and secretes B, microbe 2 eats B and releases C. C happens to do <positive thing>. You could imagine parallel pathways where maybe microbe 2 only works if it is in the presence of microbe 3.

Meaning everything is a mess to try and disentangle.

roughly2• 3 months ago

So, a metabolic pathway is the set of steps by which an organism converts one molecule into another - this can be by splitting a molecule into pieces, by adding or removing an atom or small group of atoms, or by combining two different molecules into a larger or more complex one. By way of a very, very simple pathway, your body breaks down ethanol (alcohol, C2H5OH) by first removing a hydrogen (and causing the oxygen to double-bond to the carbon) to create Acetaldehyde, CH3CH=O, and then oxidizing that by swapping the H remaining on the second carbon for an OH to create Acetic Acid, the primary component in vinegar. So, when we say your body metabolizes ethanol into acetic acid, we're talking about a two step metabolic pathway.

Bacteria can stash intermediate pathway results outside of their cell wall for various reasons (sometimes the chemical environment is more amenable outside the cell than inside, sometimes buildup of the intermediates can disrupt other processes, sometimes that's just how it happens - biology is weird), and very often what you'll see is that a multi-step metabolic pathway can span across multiple different organisms - so, species 1 takes up a starting material, performs a handful of modifications, and then excrete the results outside the cell wall, and then another species will take up that substance and perform additional modifications on it, and this can run through several species before reaching the terminal state in the pathway (including the first species again). This works because each bacteria can have different enzymes and different internal chemistry which can affect how easy or likely a reaction is.

Nitrogen fixing is a notable example of this - it's not just one species in the roots of legumes responsible for taking N2 and converting it into ammonia, there's 6 or 7 that take part in that pathway.

jareklupinski• 3 months ago

chase it with a shot of espresso for 1000x increase

ksjdhdbdb• 3 months ago

Honestly has anyone tried eating peppermint and chilli?? It honestly amplifies the effects of chilli .... Do not recommend.

euroderf• 3 months ago

OTOH chili and coffee together merely destroy your tongue..

sublinear• 3 months ago

I think you're far better off looking after your longer term diet to prevent the inflammation in the first place. Antioxidants in plant foods are your phenols, carotenoids, and vitamins while in meat they are amino acids making up complete proteins. The mechanisms at play there are way better understood.

I personally try to make sure I include ingredients like garlic, cinnamon, ginger, etc. where possible, guiding my snacks more towards nuts and cheeses, and avoiding too much saturated fat while still getting most of my protein for the day from real meat. I take my salads and stir-fries very seriously, but it seems to be a lost art at times.

I try not to overthink these basics, but I'm willing to bet many people have mediocre to poor diets from this perspective despite knowing better because they lose track and things get boring.

I feel like in this day and age we should be in the middle of a scientific and culinary renaissance full of exciting recipes that incorporate these ingredients in new ways. Instead I see a lot of traditional or ethnic-inspired cuisine lacking creativity. Not that what we have is bad, just boring.

All this to ask if anyone has solid cookbook recommendations?

Combining spicy foods with mint boosts anti-inflammatory effects 100x or more

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