Why You Should Be Chowing Down On Spicy Food On An Exceptionally Hot Day

When the thermometer creeps past 90 degrees Fahrenheit, your body might be protesting the heat with cravings for ice cream, frozen cocktails, and cold ceviche. A chilled drink or dish might provide some superficial refreshment in the heat, but the best thing you can do to actually cool your body is to go for something hot and spicy. It may seem counterintuitive, but as hot foods come into contact with our body's thermoreceptors, our nervous system gets the message that it's time to chill. We begin to sweat, and as the perspiration evaporates, we cool down. 

And while you'd be right to think that our skin can generally do a good job of detecting how hot it is outside, we actually have a particularly high concentration of temperature sensitive receptors on our lips and our tongues. And that means the spicy food you eat doesn't even have to actually be at a high temperature to cool you down. If your summer snack is high enough in capsaicin for your mouth to taste like it's on fire, it will fool your physiological cooling system into getting to work, too. So, when the sun's bearing down a tad too much, get cooking with the spiciest ingredients you can find in the supermarket.

For those of you with a hard time swallowing anything spicier than a bell pepper, there's still hope for this hot weather food hack. For one thing, yes you can increase your spice tolerance. But if you want to skip the spice and are willing to fill up on some hot liquid, you'll actually find that you cool off much faster than if you were to drink something cold. A 2012 study published in Acta Physiologica found that test subjects cooled off faster while exercising if they drank warm water first. And in 2016, a related study published in the Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise journal found that a belly full of ice slurry actually made cooling go slower. This is likely because the warmer temperature inside the subjects' stomachs kept their bodies sweating even while their perspiration was giving off chillier signals to the thermosensors on their skin. The opposite was the case for the ice slurry test. 

So, if you find yourself needing to crank up your biological air conditioner, take a cue from other hot climate cultures and drink something hot. You could have Thai tom yum soup, Vietnamese pho, or refresh your stamina the Korean way with ginseng chicken samgyetang. And when happy hour hits on your summer Fridays, take a look at these expert tips for perfect hot cocktails, and have a hot toddy instead of a chilled daiquiri.