When you look at so-called alternative medicine, one of the remedies that is often pushed is using different spices against different disease, and quite frequently using spice as a cancer cure. Every time anyone have looked into any of these spices as a cure for something, they have of course turned out to be mostly worthless, though a few have turned out to have some effect.
This of course, leads to the claim that spice consumption is an ancient remedy against cancer. Unfortunately, a study from last year has shown that this is not likely to be the case.
No evidence that spice consumption is a cancer prevention mechanism in human populations by Antoine M Dujon et al
Abstract
Why humans historically began to incorporate spices into their diets is still a matter of unresolved debate. For example, a recent study (Bromham et al. There is little evidence that spicy food in hot countries is an adaptation to reducing infection risk. Nat Hum Behav 2021;5:878–91.) did not support the most popular hypothesis that spice consumption was a practice favoured by selection in certain environments to reduce food poisoning, parasitic infections, and foodborne diseases.
MethodsBecause several spices are known to have anticancer effects, we explored the hypothesis that natural selection and/or cultural evolution may have favoured spice consumption as an adaptive prophylactic response to reduce the burden of cancer pathology. We used linear models to investigate the potential relationship between age-standardized gastrointestinal cancer rates and spice consumption in 36 countries.
ResultsPatterns of spice are not consistent with a cancer mitigation mechanism: the age-standardized rate of almost all gastrointestinal cancers was not related to spice consumption.
ConclusionsDirection other than foodborne pathogens and cancers should be explored to understand the health reasons, if any, why our ancestors developed a taste for spices.
I appropriate the effort to understand why spice was introduced into food in some parts of the world, and am looking forward to future research results
It is difficult to see how you could prove it, but it has always seemed likely to me that spices and herbs were used to make food taste good, and the more variety you had available the more you were able to make the often limited variety of food you had taste good and also not taste the same all of the time.