After my blog about my salsa incident yesterday, I started googling for treatments for chile pepper burns, and I found a lot of people saying that if you immerse your skin in lemon juice, it gets rid of the burn. Lemon juice??? I wondered how that was possible, because if it's an acid from the chile burning me, I wouldn't think that adding more acid would help anything. So, I did a little research (aka looked at wikipedia and did another google search to find the chile pepper institute website) and found out some very interesting stuff!
It turns out, chile pepper "burns" are NOT acid burns. The compound that makes our skin feel like it's burning is called capsaicin (see the structure above.) It's made in the internal membranes of chile peppers (and in the other fleshy parts), with the highest concentration in the white pith around the seeds (no shocker there.) But here's the crazy part--it doesn't actually cause any real damage to the tissue when it's causing all that pain. Instead, it binds to some receptors in our cells (which, incidentally, are related to some of the ion channels we study in our lab!) and causes them to send a signal to the brain of pain and burning. It doesn't cause a chemical burn at all--just the sensation of one.
Apparently, birds are not affected by capsaicin at all, only mammals. And this makes sense, because when I bird eats the chile peppers, the seeds come out the other end unharmed, whereas when a mammal eats the pepper, the seeds won't germinate after digestion. So the plant is trying to make sure only birds eat it, not mammals.
So I didn't actually have chemical burns on my hands--that makes me feel better. But I'm still going to wear gloves next time!
3 comments:
So did you try the lemon juice?
Yes, actually, but this was the morning *after* the incident and by then my hands only hurt a little bit. It didn't seem to help immediately, but after a while they did stop hurting...but then they may have just done that on their own? Hard to say. I think the lemon juice thing is supposed to be used like right after you handle the peppers.
I think I saw a Mythbusters on this once, but I think they were talking about the burning sensation in your mouth (they seemed to conclude that milk or water was the best thing for that!)
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