All yachtsmen enjoy a ripping hot curry after a cold, wet passage: now the news is it’s good for you.

Spicy chillies kill cancer cells, boffins say, especially those in the prostate gland. Prostate cancer kills 10,000 people every year in the UK.

Scientists from the University of California at Los Angeles discovered that mice with prostate cancer that were fed capsaicin – the chemical in chillies – had tumours a fifth of the size of those that were not.