Why does your nose water when you eat food? Especially spicy food.
Your upper respiratory tract and mouth, which includes your nose, throat, and soft palate (“back of the throat”), is all covered with mucous membranes. The response of a mucous membrane to an irritant is to release lots and lots of mucus, to wash it away. So when you put spicy food into your mouth and swallow it, your entire mucous membrane system goes into Red Alert and starts pumping out the mucus. You don’t notice the extra mucus that’s produced in your throat and which goes down along with the five-alarm chili, but you do notice what exits through your nose.