Why does the ability to eat spicy foods in large amounts literally make you manlier?
You might wonder why this is so important. Well, now you have one more opportunity to show your friends how alpha you are, by eating food that makes you cry like a girl.
Contradictory, isn’t it? Only now, when they ask you why you do it, and how you can eat so much without dying, you have science behind your back.
A French study published in the journal Physiology and Behavior found that males who have higher testosterone levels tend to love spicy food a lot more.
The study was done on 144 male subjects aged 18-44. They were given mashed potatoes with salt and spicy pepper sauce. Scientists concluded that the men who were tested to have higher testosterone levels from their saliva samples showed a tendency to put a lot more hot sause on their meals.
The study done by scientists from the University of Grenoble-Alpes in France managed to find a relation between how much spicy food a man likes and his tendency for aggression, social dominance and risky behaviors.
On the other hand, having low levels of testosterone has been related to depression and lethargy. Why this is the case is still not fully clear and scientists are still working on the finding the causes for it.
A study done in 2013 has found that mice that were given food with capsaicin, the compound which makes food hot, had higher levels of testosterone than the control group, which again raises the likelihood of a biological connection.
Or, it could sauce be just an environmental reason, where a certain culture associates spicy food with masculinity, or maybe even the color of the condiment. Another study from the same year found that men that liked red had a tendency to demonstrate higher testosterone levels.
