this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023

361 points (94.1% liked)

News

23427 readers

2437 users here now

Welcome to the News community!

Rules:

1. Be civil

Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.

2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.

Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.

3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.

Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.

4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.

Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.

5. Only recent news is allowed.

Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.

6. All posts must be news articles.

No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.

7. No duplicate posts.

If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.

8. Misinformation is prohibited.

Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.

9. No link shorteners.

The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.

10. Don't copy entire article in your post body

For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

361

'One Chip Challenge' pulled from shelves after mother says spicy tortilla chip contributed to her son's death (www.nbcnews.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

166 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Paqui, the maker of extremely spicy tortilla chips marketed as the “One Chip Challenge,” is voluntarily pulling the product from shelves after a woman said her teenage son died of complications from consuming a single chip.

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.

Lois Wolobah told NBC Boston that her 14-year-old son, Harris Wolobah, ate the chip Friday, then went to the school nurse with a stomachache. Wolobah said Harris — a sophomore at Doherty Memorial High School in Worcester, Massachusetts — passed out at home that afternoon. He was pronounced dead at the hospital later that day, she said.

Until sales of the product were suspended, Paqui's marketing dared people to participate in the challenge by eating a chip, posting pictures of their tongues on social media after the chip turned it blue and then waiting as long as possible to relieve the burn with water or other food.

The challenge has existed in some form since 2016.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 80 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 48 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I read elsewhere that the 2023 chip does in fact no longer include the blue coloring.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If I recall, the chip I ate was a virulent green. I expect blue die made a yellow chip green.

[–] captain_aggravated 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Vibrant?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Not a bright color, dark and foreboding.