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Comment by Xophmeister | Hacker News Reader

I remember reading that dairy-based "antidotes" such as milk or yoghurt aren't ideal, especially as you get spicier, and that a better option is sugary water. Unfortunately, I don't quite remember the chemical/physical justification for this; something along the lines of the fats in dairy products just coating the spices in your mouth temporarily, while sugar actually absorbs and washes it away.

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Mythbusters did a show on it (didn't personally watch it) and milk came out on top for them. Capsaicin is fat-soluble, so the lipophilic casein in milk coats it apparently. The sugar water claim seems to be because they use it when measuring Scoville units, but seems odd to me. Soluble in alcohol too.

lipophilic and fat soluble mean the same thing.

I'm surprised to see all the pepper fanatics chugging milk. I'm a spice wuss and know nearly zero about the stuff. But, as soon as I read that Scoville units were based on sugar water, I started using sweet stuff to cancel the burn. Works great. Whereas milk hardly helps at all.

That makes sense. Indian meals typically end with insanely sweet desserts, and sweet tea with milk.

milk is sugary water

Despite the downvotes, this is an accurate statement. There are 13g of sugar in 8oz of milk, which is half of what you'd get from a Coca Cola but still a fair bit of sugar.

Protein! And fats, for that matter; there's much more to milk than sugar.

I didn't say it didn't also have fats and protein. I said it has quite a bit of sugar.

It actually has more sugar than fat or protein. Quite a bit more.

If you dump 13g of sugar into 8oz of water, do you not have sugary water? If you then dump in 8oz of protein and fat, does it cease being sugary water?

Yes, sugar. But it's lactose, which is much less sweet on a mass basis than sucrose, or even glucose.

"Sugary water" is pejorative because it's just sugary water; so I'd say that the answer to your second question is no.

In this context the question is whether "sugary water" is better for removing heat. It's not pejorative to point out that at its core, milk is also sugary water. It's not a health statement. It's a comment about the supposed higher effectiveness of sugary water.

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