Ethnogens : Capsicum chinense - Habanero Fever

For the past couple of days I've had a fever of around 102°f that would not break, no matter what I tried. My normal go to drug for fever is the old standby Acetaminophen / paracetamol and for a couple of hours it did work, but the fever just came right back.

It's important to understand that the source of this fever was probably viral. I didn't have any indications of a bacterial infection and I'll spare you the details of how I figured that out. As a viral infection, letting the fever run it's course for a few hours is probably a good idea, since cooking the virus is one way the body has of weakening the the virus so it can clean it up safely. But this was a danger zone fever because at 104°f, brain damage can begin to occur and let's be honest here, I really don't have many brain cells left as it is.

I called a friend and asked her to run me to the hospital so I could get some IV fluid because I wasn't holding anything down and was quickly becoming dehydrated. She came by and also brought me something she said was an old family recipe that always made her feel better.

It was just chips and salsa. Nothing fancy at all. The salsa was home made and is a staple of the local diet here in Tijuana. I'm not a fan of spicy foods, but it looked and smelled so good I just had to give it a try.

This was hotter than anything I've ever eaten, but in my condition I couldn't really feel the heat. It just tasted kind of sweet and salty. As I ate, something amazing happened...

In a few moments I was completely drenched head to toe in sweat. My fever broke and I felt something. I felt better, like I had just finished a heavy workout or something. I could feel endorphins surging through my body.

I ended up eating the entire bowl of chips and salsa, and drank a whole liter of water in the process.

This amazed me, but I figured maybe the fever had just broken on it's own or it was placebo effect or something.
Either way I was now holding down food and water and my fever was gone. I decided to take a pass on the hospital for now.

I'm not advising anyone here to avoid seeking immediate medical attention when they are ill, but I did want to relate my experience and explain why I'm adding this to my regular diet.

So after taking a nice hot shower I went to bed. I got a full 8 hours sleep and slept like a baby. My fever has not returned and I feel better than I have in years. As soon as I woke up, I called my friend and asked what was in it because I needed to know.

The ingredients are...
Red tomatoes, habanero peppers, green onions, white onions, cilantro, garlic

All of these except the habanero peppers are a regular part of my diet. So I did my homework on the peppers to see what research had been done. The truth is there isn't much research on this at all. Yet I've now asked one doctor, two medical students and a couple of random neighbors.

They all agree, habanero pepper is great for treating a fever, the hotter the better. This is evidently common knowledge here. The most common response to my inquiry was along the lines of "Duh! Everyone knows this here!"

Ok so that's interesting. I managed to find two or three medical studies that back this claim, but the internet is basically devoid of it, at least in English. Yet every Mexican I've talked to about it was mostly just surprised that I was surprised.

That makes Habanero peppers an Ethnogen. Entheogens are medicines that are well known to a local group of people, but are basically unknown outside that group. That particular term is reserved for psycho active substances, so maybe a new term is warranted. I'm going to coin a new term "Ethnogen". If you go to an area, find that some food or drug is commonly known to have an effect, but the effect is all but unknown outside that area, then call it an "Ethnogen" since there seems to be no other word for it.

The active ingredient in Habanero peppers is capsaicin which is well understood and there have been a lot of studies on its effects on the human body. But it's an ethnogen in this case because except for two studies in rats, no one has systematically explored it's use as an antipyretic.

According to one of the medical students I talked to, the suspected method of action is that it causes blood vessels to relax. This is important when you are sick especially with fever, because the blood vessels are constricted. By increasing blood flow, the body is able to marshal it's immune resources more quickly. This is similar to exercising when you're sick. The pepper is telling your body you just exercised.

An alternative theory is that the "heat effect" convinces the body the target temperature has been reached and this tells the autonomic nervous system to shut the fever mechanism off. Then the endorphin rush created a sense of well being that made it easier to sleep and the body handles the rest.

I'm not sure these are drastically different theories, but then again I'm not a doctor, not even a medical student.

Whatever the method of action, the results I personally experienced cannot be argued with. My body appears to have cleared this virus and I am convinced that chips and salsa were the primary reason. As strange as that sounds.

Now of course the salsa has other ingredients as well. One of the ingredients, garlic, is known to break down into sulfonamides in the digestive tract. Sulfonamides are a well known class of broad spectrum antibiotic. But the action was entirely too rapid to be due to that. It can take days of eating a lot of raw garlic to get to therapeutic levels. This was rapid. Literally the fastest I've ever seen!

From now on, at the first sign of a cold or flu I'm eating chips n salsa.
I'll update this post with the exact recipe as soon as she gives it to me.
update: She refuses to divulge the recipe, of course. I'll keep bugging her but evidently family recipes are closely guarded secrets here.

references:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16262998
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11435748
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1575955/

image courtesy of foodnetwork.com