Ephedra, used as a pure drug to treat asthma, was originally derived from the Chinese herb, Ma Huang. Robitussin is one of the more common over-the-counter drugs used to loosen mucus, called an expectorant. The active ingredient in Robitussin is guaifenesin, which is derived from guaiacol, which has the same chemical structure as capsaicin. In fact, one third of all prescription drugs in the United States were derived from a plant compound--just like cayenne.

What is even more amazing is the 3OOO plus scientific studies listed in the National Library of Medicine on the health benefits of capsaicin and cayenne. Nearly all research money in America comes from major drug firms, or the National Institutes of Health, which uses 95% of its money to fund drug studies. Drugs are patentable substances, which can be protected against competition, thus improving the chances of making a substantial profit

During the 17 year life of the patent. Natural substances, like cayenne, cannot be patented, and hence are of little interest to drug companies, except to create drug analogs (molecules that are similar to the natural molecule but different enough to be patented). The fact that 3OOO studies exist on the merits of capsaicin, with no serious drug patron to fund the studies shows how valuable this humble little fruit may be to our future health care system. Imagine how many studies would be done on capsaicin if we invested research dollars based upon a simple formula of risk to benefit to cost of that item.

The lengthy alphabetical listing in the next section regarding the health benefits from cayenne all stem from the basic mechanisms on how it influences the human body:

 Thins the blood. My wife and I took a tour of a southern plantation in Louisiana near the Mississippi River. The tour guide told us that the river would sometimes get "too thick to drink and too thin to plow." The same might be said for the blood of the typical American. With too much fat, saturated fat, cholesterol, and sugar in the diet; and not enough fish oil, flax oil, fiber, vitamin E and cayenne--we end up with blood that is sludgy. Imagine how much harder a swimming pool pump would have to work if the pool was filled with yogurt instead of water. that’s how much harder your heart has to work to move the sludgy blood that is a product of our lifestyle.

Our bodies are a miraculous network of 6O,OOO miles of blood vessels with a heart muscle that pumps 55 million gallons of blood over the course of a lifetime to feed all 6O trillion cells in your body. Some blood vessels are so narrow that the blood cells must squeeze down the passageway.

 Curare is an herbal extract that has been used for centuries as a muscle relaxant in the Amazon jungle The local people apply curare to the tip of a dart, shoot a monkey, and the curare weakens the monkey until it drops out of the tree and becomes dinner. In the past few decades, curare has become a favorite medication for anesthesiologists in the operating room to keep the patient's muscles relaxed.