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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.

woah be careful you're about to dismantle the whole anti vax argument if you keep talking like that

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.

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."

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

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

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

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.

Don't check out Japan

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.

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.

I enjoyed your downvoted meme reference.

I feel bad for laughing. It's offical. We are both bad people.

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

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.

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).