Black pepper: healthy or not?

By Laura Brown, Senior Lecturer in Nutrition, Food, and Health Sciences, Teesside University

Everybody knows that consuming too much salt is bad for your health. But nobody ever mentions the potential impact of the other condiment in the cruet set: black pepper. Does it have an effect on your health?

Certainly, people through the ages have thought so. Black pepper, the dried berries of the Piper nigrum vine, has been part of traditional Indian (Ayurvedic) medicine for thousands of years. Ayurvedic practitioners believe that it has “carminative”…

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