Hot chili pepper have endless health benefits

[nmnita]

Originally Posted by jlawrence01

Serranos peppers are available in nearly EVERY grocery store in Chicagoland.

In our stores as well. So are most common kinds of peppers. For an unusual ones, we have Mexican grocers as well as Indian and Asian. Between all of them, peppers are easy to find.

[emoeskaite]

Originally Posted by EugeneOnegin

Nearly all of the commonly eaten chiles are cultivars and show very little resemblance to their wild ancestors. The wild types are very small, about the size of a pea, sometimes even smaller. Cultivar is a portmanteau of "cultivated" (or possibly cultigen) and "variety," it just means a type that has been created through human selection. This includes pretty much everything except wild bird types such as chiltepin, piri piri, malagueta, and cumari, which are botanical varieties, but not really cultivated varieties. Even these varieties have probably been selected to a limited extent by humans, but they're still very wild.

Cayennes are in the same species (annuum) but they were not bred from bell peppers and jalapenos. They predate Columbus and were likely selected from more wild types at least several thousand years ago, and possibly 8,000+ years ago. They are a lot more similar to wild bird types than either jalapenos or bell peppers especially, in both form and heat level.

Right now there are no commercially grown or approved GMO peppers in the US, though New Mexico State University has been trying to create some.

This was the missing part of my knowledge about peppers. Thank you!

[OpenD]

Originally Posted by emoeskaite

May these cultivars be archived through genetic modification? That would mean that we eat GMO by eating some of the chilis, which wouldn't be necessarily healthy.

It wouldn't necessarily be unhealthy, either. Fears of GMOs are overblown. GMO technology can be very useful in solving agricultural problems, and there is no credible scientific evidence there is any health hazard as a result. GMO foods have been on the market in the US since 1994, and are considered by consensus of the scientific community to be safe.

The reason I say this is that GMO technology is being used to develop peppers that are high in Vitamin A, which could help reduce the estimated 670,000 cases of death and blindness each a year among infants 5 and younger that occur, primarily in rural communities in Asia, due to chronic Vitamin A deficiencies. Previous attempts to introduce unfamiliar vegetables containing beta-carotene into their diets have failed. So now the approach is to introduce beta-carotene into the foods they already do eat, notably peppers and rice. So called Golden Rice is ready to be grown and distributed as soon as permits are granted, perhaps next year, and so called Vitamin A Peppers are not far behind. This could be the public health "win" that finally turns around the public misperception of GMO technology.