This One Condiment

This One Condiment Instantly Improves Your Diet

Hot sauce is extremely good for you—especially if you eat it with fat. Here's why

Scientists aren’t typically the most emotional bunch, so it gets awkward when David Popovich’s colleagues walk by and see him crying at his desk. Then, they notice his bottle of extra-hot hot sauce.

“I put it on everything,” says Popovich, who studies the bioactive compounds in plants and is a senior lecturer at Massey University in New Zealand. And so should you, because according to two top pepper experts, hot sauce is healthy.

That’s largely thanks to capsaicin—the active ingredient in peppers—which has shown antioxidant, anti-inflammatory and anticancer effects in lab studies. A paper published this summer looking at half a million Chinese adults found that those who who ate spicy foods three or more times a week had a 14% reduced risk of death, compared to those who didn’t eat much spicy food.

In his own lab experiments using cancer cells, when Popovich puts capsaicin on top, cell growth is reduced. Scientists don’t know the mechanism by which capsaicin appears to work in the body. But one prominent theory, says Popovich, is that it triggers something called apoptosis: a kind of cell “suicide” that encourages the turnover of cells—some with mutations—to be recycled into new cells. “That’s one of the ways scientists think capsaicin and other active compounds in vegetables can prevent cancer development: by stimulating apoptotic cell death,” Popovich says.

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