How Cayenne Pepper Boosts Metabolism and Helps Pain

25 Jan How Cayenne Pepper Boosts Metabolism and Helps Pain

Hey, It’s Thomas DeLauer and I’m going to talk in this video about Substance P. Substance P is not a drug that’s plaguing the high school system and it’s not a hip hop artist. Substance P is something that has to do with your nervous system. In this video, I want to talk about cayenne pepper and how capsaicin, the active ingredient in cayenne pepper, can help you relieve a lot of pain, reduce inflammation, and essentially make it so that you can lose more weight and have more energy and effectiveness in the gym.

Now capsaicin has been used for over 9,000 years by Native Americans to reduce pain and to reduce inflammation whenever there were any kind of wounds or any kind of joint pains or anything like that. Now we’re starting to understand how it actually worked. We’re understanding how capsaicin, how cayenne, can reduce inflammation and reduce a lot of pain. It has to do with something called Substance P. You see, Substance P is what signals a nerve to transmit pain signals to the brain. At the end of a nerve ending, you’ve got Substance P. If you were to, say for example, touch something hot, or something were to zap you and you were to get a little bit of pain. You’d have a surge of Substance P that would tell your brain that there was pain. The thing is, that Substance P can run out. That means if you were to hold your hand on something hot for a long enough period of time, eventually it would stop hurting. It doesn’t mean that there wouldn’t be damage but eventually the pain would sort of stop, meaning the nerve would no longer be sending that pain signal to the brain.

Capsaicin or cayenne has that effect, especially topically. Let’s say for example you’ve got a wound on your arm. You could take some cayenne, put some cayenne on the wound, and yeah, you’d feel a big surge of pain initially but that cayenne, that capsaicin, would deplete the Substance P stores. Then your body has to replenish Substance P and it takes a little bit of time to do that. In effect, you get some impromptu pain relief that’s totally natural and doesn’t have the negative effects of nonsteroidal antiinflammatories like ibuprofen might on your intestinal tract and on your gut.

This is awesome pain relief for just about anything. Whether you’ve got a wound, whether you’ve got some joint pain, whether you’ve got shingles, whether it be diabetic neuropathy, or whether it’s flat out just soreness from the gym and you’re wanting to reduce some inflammation and then speed up your recovery a little bit more.

How exactly should you use capsaicin? How should you use cayenne? I’ve talked in other videos about ingesting it to increase thermogenesis and increase the metabolism and burn a little bit of extra fat, but I’ve never really talked about it from a perspective of pain relief. This is something a little bit new to everyone. Now one of the things that you can do is you can get a capsaicin or a cayenne pepper patch. They actually make patches and it’s literally like a patch that you stick on your arm or you stick wherever you’re in pain and it’s going to start depleting that Substance P, causing you to have a little bit of pain relief. You can also make a little bit of a paste. You can use some cayenne pepper, mix it with a little bit of water, and you can just put it on your skin and you’re going to get the same kind of effect.

You can also ingest it. Now I’m not a doctor so I can’t safely say that you should go right out and do this if you have an ulcer, but capsaicin and cayenne pepper can actually help an ulcer, or at least help the pain from an ulcer. Sure, you’re going to get a little bit of burning initially, but you’re also going to be able to find that Substance P is going to be depleted and you can end up having some pain relief. Not a long term effect, on the ulcer may not be amazing if you do that every day. The fact is simple. Simply using cayenne pepper, ingesting it or putting it on your skin, can make a huge difference.

I do want to give you a fair bit of warning though. Don’t use cayenne pepper on your skin right after a hot shower or with a heating pad because it’s going to open up your pores and it’s going to allow that capsaicin to seep into other areas and other nerve endings, causing you to have a lot more pain in a widespread area, versus just in one localized area where you’ll deplete Substance P and get pain relief.

There was even a study where there was one man that had this persistent pain from wounds all over his body from a bomb explosion. He found that by depleting Substance P with capsaicin that he was able to reduce his pain by over 80%. That is absolutely phenomenal. Now that doesn’t go without saying that he didn’t have a quick surge of pain when he first initiated the patch. It does go to show that when you deplete those Substance P stores, you can definitely give yourself a lot of pain relief.

Now you may be wondering how does this parlay into someone that’s trying to lose weight or how does this parlay into someone that’s working out a lot? It has a strong effect because it can help just general inflammation and joint pain as well. If you hurt your knee, maybe you hurt it squatting or maybe you were doing some lunges and you’re letting the knee come over the toe a little bit too much, and you’ve got a little bit of localized swelling and the knee is hurting a little bit, rather than ingesting a nonsteroidal antiinflammatory that’s going to wreak havoc on your digestive and intestinal system, you could just put some Substance P depleting cayenne pepper on the knee and hope that you get a little bit of relief that way. It’s not the end-all be-all, but it’s definitely going to help you out.

Now when you ingest it, it can do a lot for you in the way of helping your digestive system as well. Reducing inflammation, reducing some of the pain and some of the inflammation and swelling that occurs in your digestive system as a result of the body’s immune response to many of the foods that we’re eating. You can actually absorb more nutrients and boost your metabolism by ingesting some capsaicin.

Here’s one more little tip for you. When you ingest your cayenne pepper, it is best to do it in the raw form. It has been found that if you take it in a capsule form, it doesn’t have the effect on Substance P as much as it would if you were to just eat it. Probably has something to do with the fact that you’re not getting the quick surge of the spice on the nerve endings that you would be with a sustained release of say a capsule.

At the end of the day, capsaicin and cayenne pepper is like the laser technology of the herb world. Laser technology in the medical world, you’re going to have a little bit of pain initially, and then you’re going to have relief. Now we’re tapping into that in the herbal world. You’re going to have that initial, fiery sense of pain that you get from the cayenne pepper, but then that Substance P is depleted, and you’ve got pain relief. As always, keep it locked in here and I will keep you posted with all these new and emerging research tips. I’ll see you in the next video.