If you’ve ever found yourself in the grocery store struggling to decide between red and green bell peppers — or even just wondering what the difference is between them — you may be interested to learn that they’re the very same vegetable. In fact, green bell peppers are just red bell peppers that haven’t ripened yet, while orange and yellow peppers are somewhere in between the two stages. As they ripen, bell peppers don’t just change color — they also become sweeter and drastically increase their beta-carotene, vitamin A, and vitamin C content. So while the green variety isn’t quite as nutritious as its red counterpart, the good news is that one eventually becomes the other.
Peppers have other superpowers, too. Capsaicin, the active component that makes hot chile peppers spicy (bell peppers lack it), has been used for pain relief and other medicinal purposes for centuries. It also pairs surprisingly well with chocolate, as the cocoa-obsessed Aztec emperor Montezuma could attest. Not all peppers are as friendly to the average palate, of course. According to the Scoville scale, which measures spiciness, the world’s hottest pepper (currently the Carolina Reaper) is 200 times hotter than your average jalapeño — which is to say, probably not something you’d use to add some kick to a burger.
Media Release/Interestingfacts.com
