Teen’s death after eating a single chip highlights risks of ultra-spicy foods
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arstechnica.com
The hot pepper linked to teen's death can cause arteries in the brain to spasm.
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The keep out of reach of children and the adults only warning. Also, the thousands of videos online of people showing how hot the chip is or even ones of kids his age eating it and resulting in an ambulance trip. It wasn’t even the hottest thing that I’ve eaten honestly, but it was enough to make most people have a very bad time. The hottest natural thing that I have eaten was hot sauce prepared by the founder of Halal Guys many years ago when he worked at the original location. He called it a bad batch because it was too strong. The hottest extract was the hot wing challenge from The Mean Fiddler. This was third, but ranked closely with quite a few others.
Honestly you think keep out of reach of children on a food item is the same level of warning as not drinking bleach?
At what point do companies have an obligation to save someone from themselves? There's ample warning on this package that he shouldn't have been eating it at his age or experience with spicy foods. There's a possible argument the shop that sold it to him or his peers is at fault, but there's not much more the manufacturers could have done to warn him off.
Listing the reason why they have those warnings seems pretty reasonable. That way kids could know that it's not "some nanny state bs". The verbage of those warnings is on par with "this is unhealthy if you do this" not "this is potentially lethal if you do this". So again, honestly, how is it as stupid as drinking bleach?
Pretty much.
The verbage of those warnings is on par with “this is unhealthy if you do this” not “this is potentially lethal if you do this”. So again, honestly, how is it as stupid as drinking bleach?
I wonder if the verbiage is that way as well. I think that a requirement for warnings on super spicy food have never been codified into law. Certain challenges make you sign a waiver, but that is just because restaurants don’t want a customer attempting to claim that the restaurant is somehow liable for ambulance costs if someone feels too uncomfortable. Since the inception of the country, there has never been a need to regulate spicy food. The FDA exists and has not made guidelines that limit access to spicy products. If they did, there would be very large protests. It would be an issue for many different cultures, which allow their children to eat spicy from infancy upwards. I remember my first hot pepper. Spicy food is part of many ethnic identities. You can’t just throw up the gauntlet because one kid has died in the thousands of years that spicy has been a thing. That kid had some other issues at play. The chip hurts, but it doesn’t kill. The fact that he felt better later on and then lost consciousness screams that this uncovered something else that could have been triggered under many other circumstances, but the chip provided the lynch pin stress.
I think you are missing a few common sense points here. When since the inception of the country did manufacturers start using chemical processes to artificially spice foods to orders of magnitude higher than what naturally occurs? This is a new process and a new problem. If the FDA made limits to access of spicy food it wouldn't be all spicy foods and it wouldn't be all levels of spice. There would be no large protests because the actual amount of foods impacted would be miniscule. I respect that spice is an important part of culture and identify but I think that because it is a part of your identity you are not taking a clear objective look at it. Addressing this problem isn't an all or nothing situation, it's just the unnatural new extreme products that are the issue.
To be clear, the chip uses crushed powder from two super spicy chilies and contain no extract. It is still 5 times less than what is considered the lethal limit. I doubt it would be legal to sell anything at the lethal limit because it would be considered a poison. If 1 in a billion dies from a dose of something, the lethal limit doesn’t change. They are an outlier.
Is the lethal limit the LD50? 1 in a billion is a very favorable statistic to choose.
There are studies that put that number anywhere between .5-13g our capsaicin for a 150lb person where pure capsaicin is 15 million Scoville. The chip challenge is not pure capsaicin and is 1.7 million Scoville.
So is the lethal limit you are referencing the LD50? If you link the studies I can look into it a bit. If you are making the case that this is all safe and normal then why was the kid going to die from drinking bleach otherwise?