Studies found spicy food decrease risk of early death

Clears the sinuses.

What studies? Could you link it, please. I'm curious.

Sorry for the shorthand above. This is a 3 year old "observational study" meaning that researchers "observed" the correlation between persons who do a particular thing compared to their mortality. Just like the fake news "red wine" announcement last year.

Why these people do this stuff is beyond me.

DoctorMomo wrote: »

Spicy foods has chille which is full of vitamin C. Spicey foods are not all equal in description. Many spicey foods comes with salt, animal fat, fried foods. We need details of the study, the claim is too vague and thus invalid.

There are no details since is is "observational." No clinical activity. Like I said above, healthy people eat spicy food. People with bad digestive tracts don't. Or, active people eat spicy food. Richer people eat spicy food. People descended from warriors live in schezwan and schezwan people eat spicy food. Guess what? Spicy food eaters have a little lower mortality.

GottaBurnEmAll wrote: »

Epidemiology does not equate to mythology. It's a way of observing correlations and opening up avenues of further scientific investigation.

Scientists themselves don't misunderstand the role of epidemiology, the media does.

Furthermore, anyone who thinks that science can be used to "prove" anything doesn't understand science.

Sorry. My wording was not exact. I was thinking how nutritional and health epidemiology is usually proven wrong when actually tested. I wrote epidemiology=mythology because I was thinking of an article from Pschology Today that I had read:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/diagnosis-diet/201901/eat-lancets-plant-based-planet-10-things-you-need-know?amp

Nutrition epidemiology = mythology

The vast majority of human nutrition research — including the lion share of the research cited in the EAT-Lancet report — is conducted using the tragically flawed methodology of nutrition epidemiology. Nutrition epidemiology studies are not scientific experiments; they are wildly inaccurate, questionnaire-based guesses (hypotheses) about the possible connections between foods and diseases. This approach has been widely criticized as scientifically invalid [see here and here], yet continues to be used by influential researchers at prestigious institutions....

She goes on to note

Tragically, more than 80% of these guesses are later proved wrong in clinical trials. With a failure rate this high, nutrition epidemiologists would be better off flipping a coin to decide which foods cause human disease. 

And links to this
https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2011.00506.x

But I sort of agree, not all science has forgotten that epidemiology cannot show anything more than a correlation. Academics seem to often (sometimes) remember this. Those who use the science (doctors, politicians and policy makers, not for profit health organizations, and the media) are the main culprits.

And yes, I probably should not have used the word prove. I should have said found evidence that confirmed/supported a hypothesis instead. I had assumed that people would get the gist of what I was saying.

Another (newer) article on observational studies if interested
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6243202/