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

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

#31

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

Den_VR wrote: post #26
roughly wrote: post #10

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 sy…

> 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?

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 . 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.

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

#32

Post by IncreasePosts »

hyperhello wrote: post #27
IncreasePosts wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What part of their post indicates they eat junk? Maybe they just don't want to have spicy minty meals every day

I don’t just eat junk, but it’s hard to experiment with a whole dietary change when you have sporadic inflammation. I guess that’s why we do scientific studies, right?

Sorry to pry, but since you're here, what are the symptoms of sporadic inflammation? Any clues what causes it?

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

#33

Post by roughly »

Den_VR wrote: post #26
roughly wrote: post #10

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 sy…

> 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?

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.

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

#37

Post by ksymph »

lapetitejort wrote: post #17
msuniverse2026 wrote: post #7

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.

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?

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/

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

#40

Post by dlcarrier »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #25
dylan604 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is funny how that is the thing people turn to rather than just eating food. Let me eat junk and be happy while taking supplements.

What part of their post indicates they eat junk? Maybe they just don't want to have spicy minty meals every day

Normally I'd agree, but in this case I'd opt for the supplement. Spicy mint is a pretty repulsive flavor.
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