Rivulets of burnt-orange grease trickle down your hands and a million tiny fires burn inside your mouth. You're blissed-out, dazed and crazy from the heat. You're drenched in sweat and drooling uncontrollably. Lips trembling, face red, you're adrift in a nebula of red-hot suffering. And yet, you feel euphoric. If a medical professional examined you at this moment, she might describe your condition something like this:
Thirty-seven-year-old male with no significant past medical history presented with altered mental status, diaphoresis, sialorrhea for 10 minutes, labial tremor and facial flushing. Patient states that he began to experience symptoms soon after eating "a shitload of hot chicken."
Or in lay terms, you overindulged on Prince's extra-hot or the eponymous 400-degree hot chicken. The kind of face-blazing food that feeds the soul and the gut. It was delicious, but now your body thinks it's been maced.
The magic component of hot chicken is powdered chilis, and the magic component of hot chilis is capsaicin. Talk about receptor overload: Capsaicin is not only potent enough to leave a trail of tingly heat all through your GI tract for the better part of a day, it's also lethal — lethal! — in lab rats if you give them enough of it. (Attempts by the Scene to ascertain whether lab rats have ever been given hot chicken were inconclusive.)
But here's the good part: The body's reaction to the onrushing wall of flavor-flame is to flood your nervous system with magical, pain-killing endorphins — hence the giddy spell, the Top Gun-like rush of it all. This natural high is what heat-seekers are after when they drop the hot bomb on themselves, but for the hardcore masticating masochist, there's the thrill of the pain in and of itself.
Plus — aside from all the oil and, in some cases, lard, used in the frying — hot chicken is actually good for you. At least, the hot part is. "Peppers contain many phytochemicals, which are naturally occurring compounds found in plants," explains Vanderbilt Health dietician Cynthia Conrath. "Many of peppers' phytochemicals have antioxidant abilities."
That means hot peppers kill free radicals. While that might not appeal to the leftist in you, it should appeal to the disease-hater — and luckily, the hot chicken lover in you doesn't have to choose sides. (At least, not those sides. For a guide to how choosing your food sides can make all the difference in the hot-chicken experience, see pg. 12.)
