Maybe people are learning what we always knew - hot peppers are an appetite suppressant. As kids, they kept us from feeling hunger when times were tough - but now we use them to lose weight - and also to make salt-free diets a little more palatable.
Poor rural people in the deep South used to have to eat a lot of stuff that, while nutritious, may not have been all that tasty - turtles, buffalo carp, coons, possums, squirrels, blackbirds etc along with various less appetizing parts of hogs and cows. My mother cooked all that stuff with new potatoes corn, okra, dried beans/peas - whatever she had - and a couple of cayenne peppers in the pot made it [marginally]
fit for human consumption. As times improved after WWII, we didn't have to eat that stuff anymore!
When the Dr recently made me cut-back the salt, that experience came in handy - a dash of Tabasco makes bland and bad-tasting food edible.
Jack