Why does milk help against spicy food?

Answer

Hi Merry,

A very good question, and one that I have answered many times, both to adults and children. Everyone knows that it is best to eat bread or drink milk to extinguish your mouth after spicy food, but why is that exactly?

Well, it’s not really about extinguishing, but about a kind of ‘solving’. Just as sugar dissolves and ‘disappears’ in warm water, the substance that causes the burning sensation, as it were, dissolves in milk. It concerns the substance with the strange name capsaicin. Your pain receptors (sort of invisibly small tentacles in your cells) respond to capsaicin the same as they do to heat, signaling to your brain that your mouth is on fire. If you want to make this burning sensation disappear, the capsaicin must disappear.

Unfortunately, capsaicin does not dissolve in water because it is fatty. If you try to dissolve olive oil in a glass of water, for example, you will see that it does not work: it keeps floating to the top. It’s the same with capsaicin. By drinking water with spicy food, you make the burning sensation even worse, because with the water you spread the capsaicin well all over your mouth…

Milk, on the other hand, contains casein, which can bind to capsaicin. By drinking milk, you dissolve the capsaicin in the milk, causing it to disappear and flush with it when you swallow the milk. Other substances can also bind capsaicin, such as the starch in bread or rice, the glucose in sugar or honey, or other fats such as those in prawn crackers.

What I personally find works particularly well is milk chocolate: after all, it contains milk, sugar and fat. And it’s easier to always have on hand for spicy emergencies than a glass of milk…