What’s the Worst Hot Pepper Can Do to You?
Last month, the BMJ released a report of a 34-year-old man who was admitted to the emergency room in Cooperstown, New York, with a thunderous headache , especially painful, which could be a sign of a cerebral hemorrhage. His symptoms included dry bloating and severe head and neck pain. The man explained his suffering in a hot pepper eating contest a few days earlier, where he ate one serving of Carolina Reaper, the Guinness record holder for the hottest chili in the world .
Fortunately, such injuries are rare. “The risk is minimal,” says Paul Rosin, Ph.D., professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania who specializes in cuisine and its role in society. Rosin has been studying the unique appeal of chili peppers since the early 1980s.
According to Rosin, the harmful effects of eating pepper are not deeply understood. Some eaters experience gastrointestinal inflammation and vomiting due to excessive amounts of spices that they cannot handle. But Rosin says that if chili peppers were very harmful, they wouldn’t be as widely consumed as they are and would not be critical to the cuisines of several cultures.
Richard Nass, MD, an ear, nose, and throat specialist and assistant professor at New York University School of Medicine, says the effects of peppers on the body can be unpleasant, but are usually temporary and minor. “You may have damage to the lining [of the digestive system] and acid reflux reaching your throat,” Nass says. Such problems can be treated over the counter by following a soft diet once and for several days. “Good time for chicken and rice,” he says.
Noah Chaimberg, chef and founder of the Brooklyn-based retailer and hot sauce developer Heatonist , recommends dairy products like whipped cream and ice cream for those who feel bite after eating spicy foods. Capsaicin is fat-soluble and absorbed by the fats in these foods, he said.
Worst scenarios
Most chili bad trips can be solved in small steps. However, there have been some emergency cases of pepper overdose requiring urgent medical attention, as documented in the case reports. (A case report is an isolated case that doctors find unusual or interesting enough to be documented for the medical community.)
Computed tomography of a person with headaches showed signs of reversible cerebral vasoconstriction syndrome , a rare condition that occurs as a result of the sudden narrowing of blood vessels that supply the brain and causes monster headaches. The doctors released him after a few days of treatment and observation of symptoms. In the absence of an underlying disease, they concluded that his reaction to pepper was the cause.
The Carolina reaper, the type of pepper he ate, has an average of 1.6 million Scoville units , although individual peppers have climbed to 2.2 million. The Scoville Scale measures the concentration of capsaicin, the irritant in chili peppers that makes them pungent. By comparison , serrano peppers burn 10,000 to 20,000 scoville and 2.5 to 10,000 jalapenos.
A 46-year-old Californian man ventured into a food contest in 2016 and ate a hamburger spiced with ghost pepper puree, a variety of which reaches 1 million Scoville. He was admitted to the emergency room at Alameda County Medical Center in Auckland with a 2.5 centimeter tear in his esophagus. Doctors immediately operated on, and the man spent 23 days in the hospital, 14 of them were intubated – all because of the hamburger.
In 2014 , a 45-year-old man presented to the emergency room in Charleston, South Carolina complaining of difficulty urinating and “red lumps” in his urine. “The patient actually reported urinating on red pepper while eating spicy food,” the case report says. The ultrasound revealed a gut-cystic fistula, a ruptured interface between the intestines and the bladder, causing digestive debris to enter the man’s bladder.
These annoying incidents are anecdotal, but there is a reason chili is harmful and harmful to the body: Capsaicin binds to certain pain receptors in the nose, mouth, and skin . Subsequent sweat, skin redness, and salivation are part of the body’s system of eliminating harmful toxins. Although there has been no research to support this assumption, extreme bodily reactions such as those listed above are likely the result of overconsumption of capsaicin. “The damage is usually caused by a physical reaction to the pepper,” says Rozin.
Why do we eat food that literally hurts? “It’s like a roller coaster,” says Rozin. “It seems dangerous at first and it can take a while to adapt, depending on who you are. But even if you know it won’t hurt you, you do it for the thrill. “
In the past few years, this MTV desire for a goofy diet for pleasure has led to an arms race among mad nerds to create the world’s hottest pepper.
The hottest peppers keep getting hotter
Some of the most spicy peppers grown for a long time are the ghost pepper and the Trinidad moruga scorpion . Both are about 1 million Scoville units.
Then in the 2010s came the ‘Butch T’ scorpion pepper , a type of Trinidad moruga scorpion designed by Butch Taylor for the Hippy Seed Company (Scoville level 1.4 million) and Carolina Reaper, created by Ed Curry of Pucker Butt Pepper Co., 1. 6 million Scoville peppers. Both have been featured in the Guinness Book of World Records for a time and have been the subject of culinary challenge YouTube videos.
In 2017, Mike Smith, a North Wales farmer, created a pepper he called Dragon’s Breath, which, according to researchers at the University of Nottingham, reaches 2.5 million Scoville. Smith says eating is potentially deadly but could be medicinally useful for numbing the skin of people who are allergic to traditional anesthesia.
Not to be outdone, in the same year, Ed Curry, who became famous in the Carolina Reaper, introduced the Pepper X , which reached 3.18 million Scoville.
Chaimberg, founder of Heatonist, sells an X-flavored sauce and keeps a few peppers in the refrigerator in his company’s kitchen lab. “I took a spoon, pressed it against the pepper and tasted it,” he says. “It burns.” The company sells a Pepper X-based sauce called Last Dab, the first batch of 1,000 bottles of which sold out in 90 seconds.
Haimberg, a retired chef, says he and his clients know they are teasing their body pain and irritation system, and this is a critical part of the appeal of his products. “It almost makes your food four-dimensional because it has an element that you usually don’t,” he says. “It engages you physiologically and releases these chemicals in the brain that are not normally secreted.”