Research Paper|Volume 13, Issue 6|pp 9135—9142

Consumption of chilies and sweet peppers is associated with lower risk of sarcopenia in older adults

Xuena Wang¹, Xiaohui Wu², Ge Meng^1,³, Shanshan Bian⁴, Qing Zhang⁵, Li Liu⁵, Hongmei Wu¹, Yeqing Gu⁶, Shunming Zhang¹, Yawen Wang¹, Tingjing Zhang¹, Xingqi Cao¹, Huiping Li¹, Yunyun Liu¹, Xiaoyue Li¹, Kun Song⁵, Kaijun Niu^1,^5,^7,⁸

¹Nutritional Epidemiology Institute and School of Public Health, Tianjin Medical University, Tianjin, China
²College of Pharmacy, Tianjin Medical University, Tianjin, China
³Department of Toxicology and Sanitary Chemistry, School of Public Health, Tianjin Medical University, Tianjin, China
⁴Department of Nutrition, The Second Hospital of Tianjin Medical University, Tianjin, China
⁵Health Management Centre, Tianjin Medical University General Hospital, Tianjin, China
⁶Institute of Radiation Medicine, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and Peking Union Medical College, Tianjin, China
⁷Tianjin Key Laboratory of Environment, Nutrition and Public Health, Tianjin, China
⁸Center for International Collaborative Research on Environment, Nutrition and Public Health, Tianjin, China

Received: February 15, 2020Accepted: September 24, 2020Published: March 26, 2021

https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.104168

Copyright: © 2021 Wang et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Background: Sarcopenia is an aging-related loss of muscle mass and function, which induces numerous adverse outcomes. Capsaicin and capsiate, separately extracted from chilies and sweet peppers, have the potential to induce muscle hypertrophy via activation of transient receptor potential vanilloid 1. The present study aimed to investigate whether chili and sweet pepper consumption are related to sarcopenia in the elderly general population.

Methods: A cross-sectional study with 2,451 participants was performed. Dietary chili and sweet pepper consumption were assessed using a validated self-administered food frequency questionnaire. Sarcopenia was defined according to the consensus of the Asian Working Group for Sarcopenia. Logistic regressions were performed to measure the effect of chili and sweet pepper consumption on sarcopenia.

Results: The prevalence of sarcopenia was 16.1%. After adjustment for potential confounding variables, the odds ratios (95% confidence intervals) for sarcopenia across chili and sweet pepper consumption categories were 1.00 (reference) for almost never, 0.73 (0.55, 0.97) and 0.73 (0.56, 0.96) for ≤1 time/week, 0.60 (0.39, 0.90) and 0.66 (0.45, 0.95) for ≥2-3 times/week (both P for trend <0.01), respectively.

Conclusion: The present study showed that higher consumption of chilies and sweet peppers was related to a lower risk of sarcopenia in older adults.