Dear fellow neuroscientistis,

I always assumed that humans like hot food because consuming capsaicin "tricks" your enteric system into "believing" that your intestines are on fire. Presumably the gut then releases endorphins to cope with the pain, which brings a mild subjective "high" to a hot food lover. I guess I either read it somewhere or heard it from somebody.

But now as I try to trace the sources for this "piece of knowledge", I can't find them!

Wikipedia mentions this information as "folklore", and references a journal of alternative medicine. The only article I found so far mentions this "fact" as well, but does not provide any references for it.

Does it mean that this is not true? Or does it mean that nobody really tested it? Is it a known myth, or is an unproven speculation, but still a possibility?