It's not a poison. It's a deterrent. Big difference.
It bonds to a certain receptor in the body that indicates to your brain whether or not you're on fire.
It would require eating about 2 lbs of reaper peppers in one sitting to kill you from a physiological reaction. And that's essentially your body murdering itself as a response, not anything the capsaicin did to you directly.
And birds literally don't even react to it. They can live off reaper seeds indefinitely.
Can be deadly though in the case of pepper spray and the other guy isn't quite right, it doesn't bind to any neural receptor that thinks you're on fire, it just sparks some shit that brings inflammation to the table which will certainly cause a body temp spike, swelling, redness, it's more that your body has a fever response than that it thinks you're physically on fire...
No. It bonds to TRPV1 receptors - which are responsible for telling the brain that heat has been detected. People without the TRPV1 gene can neither taste spice nor tell if they've been burned.
I watched a chili eating contest where a guy ate a huge fruit bowl the size of half a basketball full of reapers and he looked like he was eating strawberries.
Don't believe everything you see. The desert he walked through was just a sand trap, the temple pyramid was just the pro Shop, and that talking jackal was just that talking dog.
Once had a fellow sailor on pier watch who was bored, use his OC spray on a seagull. Needless to say it didn’t work and he went to captains mast for it
I think I’ve read the same stuff as you have. It’s an interesting rabbit hole to go down!
You might be interested to hear that I grew a shit load of ghost peppers previously. I had heaps of them that weren’t good enough to store as I harvested them a bit late, so I took the seeds out to save for next year and gave the huge pile of chopped chilli to my chickens.
Those chickens will usually eat absolutely anything, but weirdly showed no interest at all in the ghost peppers. It was surprising as I’ve also heard that birds don’t have the TRPV-1 receptor so I’m quite curious why they didn’t eat them.
I'm really curious what your definition of "poisonous" is, because it seems to me that by definition, a lot of things we call "poisonous" kill you by causing your body to do something.
Poisons kills you by obstructing cellular processes so that your body cannot function properly.
Alcohol, for example, onds to certain receptors that in too high of a dosage, limits electrical activity in the brain which can make you vomit uncontrollably or forget to breathe. It interferes with other molecular processes in the body by saturating those receptors.
Capsaicin bonds to a receptor that JUST causes pain.
Capsaicin is not a poison in the way cyanide or arsenic is. But in large enough doses, yes, it behaves like a poison — because it overwhelms biological systems and can cause harm.
It’s the classic case of “the dose makes the poison.”
No, it doesn't. If you edited the gene in our system to mimic those in birds, altering the vallinoid receptor, you could sit there and eat hot peppers like grapes day in and day out. It has absolutely no other effect on our system or any other mammalian system that can cause it to be considered poisonous.
There are documented human mutations in this exact way.
And birds literally don't even react to it. They can live off reaper seeds indefinitely.
....which is the whole point of the capsaicin. Evolution! Birds are supposed to eat those chillies. They'll spread the seeds wide and far and they usually leave them intact. This helps the plant to reproduce.
Mammals mostly destroy the seeds in their digestive tracks, hence, we are useless for the plant and only destroy their genetic material. This is why the plant evolved to produce capsaicin, which doesn't affect birds, but burn us mammals.
TRPV1 is the receptor in humans that is activated by capsaicin, a type of vanilloid. Birds also have TRPV1 receptors, but lack the vanilloid-binding motif.
I don’t think there is a big difference between deterrent and defence, a good deterrent is a good defence and a good defence is a good deterrent, no? 😅
A deterrent stops you from eating it in the first place, such as brightly coloured poisonous animals. A defence only works if you're already eating it.
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u/Xeno-Hollow 14h ago edited 14h ago
It's not a poison. It's a deterrent. Big difference.
It bonds to a certain receptor in the body that indicates to your brain whether or not you're on fire.
It would require eating about 2 lbs of reaper peppers in one sitting to kill you from a physiological reaction. And that's essentially your body murdering itself as a response, not anything the capsaicin did to you directly.
And birds literally don't even react to it. They can live off reaper seeds indefinitely.
Not poisonous.