Green Chili—The Next Green Tea?

As a Southern New Mexican, I was raised on a steady diet of green chili. We would roast them, peel them, mix them up with black beans, then put the mixture on tortillas. We put them in scrambled eggs, on burgers and steaks, and into cream of mushroom soup. There’s nothing like it. Green chili is also good diced and sautéed with some butternut squash and topped with a little feta cheese. Yum!

	Green peppers might have been helping me with weight control.

I always knew that green chili was healthy and nutritious—it is full of Vitamin C (ounce for ounce, green chili has more vitamin C than citrus fruits). And I also knew that people in my town looked to chilies to improve a variety of physical conditions including poor digestion, heart health, facial wrinkles, and twitching. A doctor once prescribed Capsaicin, the active ingredient in chili peppers, to minimize a facial tic. But what I did not know was that those savory green peppers might have been helping me with weight control.

According to Heidi Allison, author of The Chili Pepper Diet, chili consumption promotes weight loss. Eating chili peppers:

1. Burns calories;
   
2. Increases your metabolism;
   
3. Curbs your appetite, especially for fatty foods and sweets;
   
4. Releases endorphins that boost your mood.

Also, a healthy diet of low fat food prepared with chili is easier to follow because the food is more flavorful. The hotter the chili, the greater the flavor.

Finding Fresh Chili

When fall arrives, the time for harvesting green chili, I recommend ordering green chili from New Mexico instead of buying it at your local grocery. The best fresh green chili comes from Hatch and the Mesilla Valley in New Mexico. A combination of high altitude, soil conditions, and long, hot growing days produces fresh Hatch green chili that is unrivaled in taste and spiciness. There are many farms that grow and harvest this crop, just search for “Hatch Green Chili” and make sure to order it directly from a farm in or around Hatch, New Mexico.

The most inexpensive way to order fresh chili is by the pound. Suppliers will ship it to your door, then you can roast and peel all of it at once and freeze it in storage. If you don’t have the time or ambition to roast and peel pounds of chili, you can buy them already prepared and frozen.