alt.hn

4/10/2026 at 8:24:56 PM

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

 https://scitechdaily.com/this-spice-combo-could-slash-inflammation-hundreds-of-times-more-effectively/

by joeax

4/10/2026 at 9:22:24 PM

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

by aappleby

4/10/2026 at 10:14:14 PM

It is also missing the "in Mice" part of the headline.

https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/18/3/376

Functional Phytochemicals Cooperatively Suppress Inflammation in RAW264.7 Cells

RAW 264.7 cells are a mouse macrophage cell line commonly used in research to study immune responses, inflammation, and cancer.

by mutagen

4/10/2026 at 10:56:04 PM

In mice, but not even real mice. That's a new one!

by ngriffiths

4/10/2026 at 9:26:57 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.

by roughly

4/10/2026 at 10:23:29 PM

> 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?

by Den_VR

4/10/2026 at 10:58:06 PM

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 <positive thing>. 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.

by 0cf8612b2e1e

4/10/2026 at 11:11:17 PM

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.

by roughly

4/10/2026 at 9:39:21 PM

Hopefully AI can help us parse some of these massive data sets and interactions.

by the_real_cher

4/10/2026 at 9:17:34 PM

So ... mint chutney, anyone?

by ChrisMarshallNY

4/10/2026 at 11:39:10 PM

My man. Why stop at chutney, when you can go all the way to Briyani (the south indian kind)

by tecoholic

4/11/2026 at 4:13:18 AM

Or melange, if we’re talking about Herbert’s Dune series.

by cmxch

4/10/2026 at 8:45:39 PM

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

by hyperhello

4/10/2026 at 9:21:46 PM

No, the article title is misleading. This is in-vitro research only.

by aappleby

4/10/2026 at 9:25:57 PM

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.

by dylan604

4/10/2026 at 10:22:57 PM

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

by IncreasePosts

4/10/2026 at 10:25:28 PM

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?

by hyperhello

4/10/2026 at 11:04:26 PM

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

by IncreasePosts

4/11/2026 at 1:32:39 AM

Literally just getting old. I’m not even old, just not young.

by hyperhello

4/11/2026 at 12:41:46 AM

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

by dlcarrier

4/10/2026 at 11:37:59 PM

You'd still get a certain effect when it comes out.

by nosrepa

4/11/2026 at 12:10:10 AM

You just need Indian food not supplements

by darth_avocado

4/11/2026 at 6:49:42 AM

I think you're far better off looking after your longer term diet to prevent the inflammation in the first place. Antioxidants in plant foods are your phenols, carotenoids, and vitamins while in meat they are amino acids making up complete proteins. The mechanisms at play there are way better understood.

I personally try to make sure I include ingredients like garlic, cinnamon, ginger, etc. where possible, guiding my snacks more towards nuts and cheeses, and avoiding too much saturated fat while still getting most of my protein for the day from real meat. I take my salads and stir-fries very seriously, but it seems to be a lost art at times.

I try not to overthink these basics, but I'm willing to bet many people have mediocre to poor diets from this perspective despite knowing better because they lose track and things get boring.

I feel like in this day and age we should be in the middle of a scientific and culinary renaissance full of exciting recipes that incorporate these ingredients in new ways. Instead I see a lot of traditional or ethnic-inspired cuisine lacking creativity. Not that what we have is bad, just boring.

All this to ask if anyone has solid cookbook recommendations?

by sublinear

4/10/2026 at 10:53:15 PM

chase it with a shot of espresso for 1000x increase

by jareklupinski

4/11/2026 at 1:59:26 AM

Honestly has anyone tried eating peppermint and chilli?? It honestly amplifies the effects of chilli .... Do not recommend.

by ksjdhdbdb

4/10/2026 at 9:24:01 PM

[flagged]

by msuniverse2026

4/10/2026 at 9:34:54 PM

There's tons of folk remedies that do absolutely nothing useful at all, too. When you don't have any reliable medicine, you take whatever you have on hand and hope for a placebo effect. Eventually, you find something helpful because even a broken clock is right twice a day.

There are recorded beliefs in medieval Germany, for instance, that carrying or wearing an eye from a bat will make you invisible.

by zdragnar

4/10/2026 at 10:09:21 PM

What’s the physical basis for that?

by nkrisc

4/10/2026 at 10:29:35 PM

Folk medicine and remedies are one thing; traditional and herbal medicine certainly has its place and is understudied.

Homeopathy however is pure nonsense even on a fundamental scientific level.

It is unfortunate that the two get conflated.

by adzm

4/10/2026 at 9:51:58 PM

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?

by lapetitejort

4/11/2026 at 5:17:15 AM

Turmeric. Honey (on burns)- Medihoney was even used in a recent Pitt episode. Aspirin, though this is older than 50 years.

by hammock

4/10/2026 at 11:39:26 PM

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/

by ksymph

4/10/2026 at 10:01:41 PM

I think the closest one ("but no cigar") might be oscillococcinum, but its popularity isn't due to doctors recommending it (because they don't, by and large).

by rkomorn

4/10/2026 at 10:11:08 PM

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscillococcinum

> There is no compelling scientific evidence that Oscillococcinum has any effect beyond placebo.

Does not sound promising

by lapetitejort

4/10/2026 at 10:15:31 PM

Wonder if that might be related to why I wrote "but its popularity isn't due to doctors recommending it (because they don't, by and large)."

by rkomorn

4/10/2026 at 9:25:15 PM

Homeopathy is not a "folk" tradition, it is simply an insane concept.

by krior

4/10/2026 at 9:29:43 PM

I once sat next to a mint plant and it cured my cold, the farther I sat the better I felt. Obviously diluted mint particles in the air cured me.

by halflife

4/10/2026 at 10:12:38 PM

We must eradicate mint plants. Over time the dilution of mint particles in the air will become so small that all diseases will go extinct

by lapetitejort

4/11/2026 at 3:32:33 AM

We need to research what the distance from mint plants on earth did to the Artemis crew.

by halflife

4/10/2026 at 9:40:51 PM

How was your chakra alignment? That may have contributed to your recovery.

by the_real_cher

4/11/2026 at 3:31:28 AM

My aura turned purple

by halflife

4/10/2026 at 9:33:00 PM

and yet it moves :^)

by msuniverse2026

4/10/2026 at 9:37:28 PM

Does it though?

by DarmokJalad1701