Thread by @GidMK

This is my favorite piece of nutritional epi nonsense for a while:

- observational study
- didn't measure chili consumption directly (!)
- small absolute risk decrease (~1.5%)
- probably nothing to do with the chili peppers!!!

And yet, the headline implies that chili peppers will cause you to have less heart attacks

THIS IS NONSENSE

(In the journo's defense, this is made clear further on in the piece)

Study is here: onlinejacc.org/content/74/25/…

I think the K-M curves from the study really say it all tho. The lines are barely different, and this is comparing highest chili consumption with lowest

Also, I cannot fathom how we can trust an assessment estimated from a single questionnaire (follow-up was 8.2 years) that doesn't specifically ask about chili consumption!

I talk a lot about whether headlines are misleading, but honestly I'm not sure you could ever have a non-misleading headline about a study that looked at whether *chili peppers* are *reducing heart attacks* ping @TamarHaspel

Note: the study did indeed ask about chili consumption, the estimation was to do with how often people ate them

This doesn't really change anything, but I was definitely wrong above 👍

Also, forgot to mention that the study found no dose-response AT ALL

The authors argued that this meant any chili eating was protective

I would say this is because it has nothing to do with the chilis

A final note is that the authors theorized that the benefits could be due to capsaicin content of chilies

This is hilariously unlikely. If you're eating small amounts of chili ~4 times a week, you're getting minuscule amounts of capsaicin