I think that tens of thousands of people have done it and this is the first fatality says that it was something unique about the victim, rather than the chip.
this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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Please see @WHYAREWEALLCAPS' repost of the NYT article below. This is the first fatality, but not the first hospitalization of a child.
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woah be careful you're about to dismantle the whole anti vax argument if you keep talking like that
The NYT has additional information that may add context.
Harris Wolobah is not the first child who has sought medical care after eating the chip. School officials in California and Texas told the “Today” show website last year that students had been taken to the hospital after eating one.
Also last year, about 30 public school students in Clovis, N.M., experienced health issues after eating the chip, KOB-TV of Albuquerque reported. As a preventive measure, the Huerfano School District in Colorado banned the chips, according to a post on its Facebook page.
In a 2020 study, researchers at the University of Mississippi Medical Center detailed the “serious complications” that can result from eating the Carolina Reaper pepper, noting that a 15-year-old boy had suffered an acute cerebellar stroke two days after eating one on a dare. The Carolina Reaper has been measured at more than two million Scoville heat units, the scale used to measure how hot peppers are. The Naga Viper has been measured at just under 1.4 million Scoville units. Jalapeño peppers are typically rated at between 2,000 and 8,000 units.
But that has not stopped the curious.
Colin Mansfield of Beaumont, Calif., and his nephew Cole Roe, 15, ate the chip together over FaceTime and Mr. Mansfield shared the video on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. Mr. Mansfield, who makes his own hot sauce, said that it was like a “really spicy curry” and that the heat began to wear off after about 10 minutes. (His nephew, he said, needed a drink after 30 seconds.)
But that’s when another side effect kicked in for both of them: a crippling stomachache.
“I was on the floor, in a fetal position,” Mr. Mansfield said, adding that he wouldn’t have eaten the chip had he known that it would feel as if “somebody put you on the ground and kicked you in the stomach.”
Devin McClain and Jade Dian, who live in Houston, said they had also experienced stomach pains after recording themselves eating the chip — and then chasing it with water, milk and ice cream — for their YouTube channel.
“It was instant pain,” Ms. Dian said. “The milk was not helping, the ice cream was not helping.”
Mr. McClain said that even after the intensity of the heat had faded in his mouth, he could still feel it in his body.
“You could feel it spread; that’s the worst part, honestly,” he said.
Clearly the stomachache response is not unheard of. In addition, stomach distress can be a symptom of anaphylaxis. I have to wonder if it's people with very, very mild allergies to capsaicin and the amount and strength in these peppers are pushing it into extreme allergic reaction. One thing that gets me wondering is that nothing listed in the ingredients, to my admittedly limit knowledge, should turn your tongue blue. So how are they achieving that, what ingredient is not listed? When trying to find out through Googling it, I found even more cases of people getting hospitalized because of the chip, especially teenagers, in previous years.
In the chili-head community, these stomach aches are well known as "cap cramps" (capsaicin cramps) and it happens to just about everyone while building a tolerance to capsaicin. Over time and continued eating of mega hot stuff, these cap cramps get less severe and the amount of capsaicin ingested in order to trigger cap cramps increases as tolerance builds.
Competitive pepper eaters actually make themselves vomit after eating large amounts of super hots in order to avoid the cap cramps, they can last for double-digit hours to if enough is consumed.
These cap cramps send a lot of folks to the hospital if they don't know any better, but they haven't been life threatening for healthy adults. The data just isn't there for that.
A lot of people will also over indulge on dairy thinking they are helping the burn in their mouth, but drink a half gallon of milk in one sitting and it upsets stomachs, too.
I'd be interested in knowing how the study at the University of Mississippi directly correlated the stroke to the hot pepper a full two days after ingesting, that seems like a stretch to me. What is it about the mechanism of capsaicin on receptors that would cause a stroke?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7136587/
This is the study. There was no stroke for this person, but what they call reversible cerebrovascular vasoconstriction syndrome. He presented two days after the pepper, after football practice, for a headache that wouldn't go away.
The study never says the pepper caused the issue, but it is hypothesized.
Further, if you dig into the links in the study of other examples of extreme reactions to hot peppers, you have
A) esophageal rupturing after a bout of violent retching a vomiting after eating a ghost pepper
B) acute myocardial infarction and coronary vasospasm by someone taking cayenne pepper pills for weight loss where the abstract is just postulating capsaicin was the cause, but end of the day dude was taking diet pills
C) some nothing burger abstract about someone having a thunderclap headache after eating a super hot
There isn't even an adequate sample size to be statistically significant with regards to capsaicin being the root cause for any of these issues, not to mention none of these studies are actually confirming their abstract to any reasonable degree.
I'm not saying the chip didn't lead to this young man losing his life, but there is no worthwhile scientific data pointing to that being a legitimate reason. This is an outlier case I'm interested in the outcome and I feel for the young man's family, but my hypothesis is that we'll find out any correlation to the one chip challenge will only be tangentially related.
So how are they achieving that, what ingredient is not listed?
Ingredients I see (at least on the search result from the official website, likely cached) say blue corn and blue 1.
The page itself with talk of the 2023 version doesn't list anything about blue (and explicitly says in the FAQ that there's no dye), so maybe they gave up on that.
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People are calling this kid stupid. I disagree.
Nobody buying food in America would think that a single serving product would be able to kill you without any sort of prior health conditions. This is a completely fair assumption and one that is important.
Second, the one chip challenge has been in the public eye for a while. There are multiple examples of people eating them successfully in previous years. When things do go badly, it's usually something along the lines of "I threw up everywhere". That's a far cry from dying and along the lines of risks teenagers have taken for decades.
Third, a ton of food items use the skull and crossbones motif. I've seen it on hot sauces that aren't even that spicy. Nobody assumes that the skull and crossbones means risking death. This is, again, because everyone assumes that food is generally safe to eat.
In conclusion, don't sell things in convenience stores that can kill an otherwise healthy person in short order. While this is especially true for children, it's a good rule of thumb in general.
The chip has been safe to eat for millions of people for years.
Capsaicin consumed orally isn't fatal. This kid probably has some other underlying health problems he was simply not aware of, but it's not like it's an inherently lethal product. If a kid with an unknown peanut allergy eats and dies from a Snickers, it's not like Snickers are actually a lethal food.
It does say it's intended for adults only, but that's hardly ever stopped teenagers from doing anything ever. It's probably good they pulled it temporarily, but the real answer here is probably simply "Don't sell this to minors."
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Why are people taking it for granted that peppers can kill you? They almost never, if ever, do. No, they can't, in a practical sense, and it's very weird you're immediately ready to believe that they do
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Third, a ton of food items use the skull and crossbones motif. I've seen it on hot sauces that aren't even that spicy.
Even regular water can have morbid branding https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_Death
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Even as someone who loves really spicy foods, I think the ever-escalating spicy trend is getting ridiculous. After a certain point you don't taste anything and its just a dumb one-upsmanship contest.
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The chips were sold individually, and their seasoning included two of the hottest peppers in the world: the Carolina Reaper and the Naga Viper.
Each chip was packaged in a coffin-shaped container with a skull on the front.
This is about the most wasteful product I've ever encountered. You wrap one chip in plastic to keep it fresh and then throw cardboard around it with tons of empty space and then ship those on trucks?! What the fuck.
I support killing this product on its environmental harm whether it's implicated in the teen's death or not.
One of my favorite bits from Futurama is when Fry is using some "make your own Oreo cookie" device that has individually wrapped cookies and individually wrapped cream, so he'd open each one, toss the plastic, smush them together just to take them apart like some people do with Oreos.
Hilarious and horrifying because you just know we have products like that today lol
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On a 'plastic per calories' scale this is very wasteful indeed. But actually it is not just a chip, its more of an activity being sold. Other activities are much worse resource-wise. Some people go skydiving, others eat a chip at home.
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Tbf I would assume there's not much volume being sold, considering it's definitely at most a serving being packaged. Afaik nobody is out there buying a handful of these to eat as a snack.
EDIT: based on the other comments, it seems like the average consumer buys at most one of these in their lifetime, haha.
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Idk how the legal accusations stand up, as there are warnings and liability disclaimers everywhere on it...
I've eaten it, most of my friends have, and we were fine. But I've known others who reacted much more strongly to just a crumb, so I can see how with preexisting conditions that could happen.
In doing some research, I found that there have been quite a few people reporting stomacheaches and being hospitalized from previous years of the chip. There's also been a case of 15 year old dying from a stroke caused by the Carolina Reaper pepper. I hate to say it, but I think that maybe we're taking these peppers too far to the point that they are becoming hazardous to our health.
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anyone born after 2008 can't cook... all they know is mcdonald's , charge they phone, play Roblox, eat hot chip & die
I enjoyed your downvoted meme reference.
I feel bad for laughing. It's offical. We are both bad people.
And talk shit over wifi cause they phone never on.
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I had the hottest one one time and legitimately thought I was going to have to go to the hospital. I ate it around 1PM and my entire rest of my day was gone to extreme sickness like I've never experienced before. To this day I get very sick feeling any time I smell something similar to it.
I love spicy foods but the super hot peppers are just different. Even a small amount in food where it doesn't taste spicy will wreck my gi tract for at least 24 hours. Shit ain't natural
They aren't meant for people who enjoy flavor. They're meant for dudebros who are cripplingly insecure in their masculinity and feel a constant need to prove themselves, even though no one gives a shit. The same people who buy dude wipes and giant pickups.
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this is hands down a 'shit happens' events. its not always someones fault someone gets hurt.
Goes to show that we know so little still about gut biology.
Any idea how many scovilles these things are?
It wasn't too long ago that I had a habit of using 600,000 scoville unit hot sauce on things. Now I'm wondering if I was taking my life in my hands every time I had that sauce.
Likely more than 2 million.
The kid likely had a preexisting condition or maybe some genetic disposition as hundreds if not thousands of people eat food at that heat level each day without incident.
Or it had nothing to do with the chip at all. The article says that the cause of death hasn't been determined yet.
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If you built up to it and you don't get a negative reaction youll be fine. Spouse eats super spicy, to me, just fine. I'll occassionally put a little of it and I'm get a runny nose, flop sweat and a bowel movement with half an hour after eating. These people probably dont eat a lot of spicy food. Its like running a marathon straight from being a couch potato. Your body is not ready for that.
The article says:
Carolina Reapers score around 1.7 million Scoville heat units and Naga Viper peppers around 1.4 million.
I've had dried naga pepper in food a few times, it's not nice. It burns all the way through, I could feel it burning in my stomach. I ended up throwing up rather than dealing with it. I'll gladly stick to the much tastier scotch bonnets (100-350k SHU).
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