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

61 pointsby joeaxtoday at 8:24 PM31 commentsview on HN

Comments

aapplebytoday at 9:22 PM

The article title is super misleading - this is about measurements of inflammatory markers in vitro and explicitly does not generalize to food intake.

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roughlytoday at 9:26 PM

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 synergistic effects, you hit a combinatorial wall quickly. In microbiology, for instance, colonies of different bacterial species are the norm, not the exception, and metabolic pathways that span multiple species are common to the point that trying to isolate a given species’ contribution can miss the effect entirely.

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jareklupinskitoday at 10:53 PM

chase it with a shot of espresso for 1000x increase

ChrisMarshallNYtoday at 9:17 PM

So ... mint chutney, anyone?

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hyperhellotoday at 8:45 PM

Can I take a capsaicin and a mint supplement together? Is that enough to get the effect?

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msuniverse2026today at 9:24 PM

[flagged]

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josephcsibletoday at 8:33 PM

That particular combination reminds me of https://www.tumblr.com/nudibranchparty/188803422027/fun-fact...