Posts Tagged ‘avoid heart disease’
Spice Up Your Life and Live Longer
If you found it a little hard to believe that the likes of fish oil and Bran Buds could be good for your heart, how would you feel if I told you that hot red peppers were heart helpers, too? Believe it. Medical researchers in Bangkok, Thailand, have found that hot peppers, or capsicum, as they’re also known, may well contain a substance that could turn out to be tomorrow’s miracle drug. While capsicum is scalding your tongue, it seems, it’s also cooling commotion in your blood vessels. This fiery little vegetable, grown and relished throughout much of the world, now seems to be able to help protect against thromboembolism, a potentially fatal blockage of a blood vessel by a clot transported by the bloodstream from some other part of the body.
Capsicum, the Thai doctors found, causes an increase in fibrinolytic activity (FA), a natural process that helps resist the formation of large and dangerous clots by dissolving them when they’re still small. Amazingly, they also found that capsicum works its wonder not only when it is eaten but even if it is simply held in the mouth for a short time. In any event, the effect is rapid, and short-lived, disappearing in about 10 minutes. That may not sound like much, but even a temporary increase in FA might be enough to break up any little clots that are up to no good. But that’s only half the story. While it’s heating up FA, capsicum also produces a temporary reduction in the coagulability of blood, making it less likely that any clots will be created in the first place.