Want to live longer? It’s easy, according to the BBC. Eat more chiles! Specifically, the BBC recommends “chillies,” and we’ll do them a favour and labour under their rules whilst minding the gap:
For thousands of years, humans have taken a masochistic pleasure from adding chilli to their food. Now research indicates that the spice that has undoubtedly made our lives more interesting may also make them longer.
There is only one mammal that enthusiastically eats chillies.
“Humans come into the Western hemisphere about 20,000 years ago,” says Paul Bosland from New Mexico State University. “And they come into contact with a plant that gives them pain – it hurts them. Yet five separate times, chilli peppers were domesticated in the Western hemisphere because humans found some usefulness – and I think it was their medicinal use….”
A huge study, published this summer in the British Medical Journal, seemed to indicate that a diet filled with spices – including chillies – was beneficial for health.
What’s that Aztec codex photo? The BBC says it may be a way for parents to implement a “time out” for misbehaving kids:
…And in what may have been a pre-Colombian version of the naughty step, an ancient Aztec codex shows a parent propelling a teary-eyed infant near a pit of burning chillies.