this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2024
419 points (98.6% liked)

Not The Onion

11625 readers
1088 users here now

Welcome

We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!

The Rules

Posts must be:

  1. Links to news stories from...
  2. ...credible sources, with...
  3. ...their original headlines, that...
  4. ...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”

Comments must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.

And that’s basically it!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 months ago

Let me start off by saying I do not disagree. Even without death it can cause nasty stomach pains (not ulcers, though, that myth was dispelled) and cause severe irritation on the way out. In addition, a LOT of folks have undiagnosed conditions. I'm just adding perspective. I see no issue with adding a warning to products seasoned with peppers in the 800k+ range the same way you'd add one for a roller coaster because it absolutely can kill you if you have a medical condition and I'm not so sure that people realize that.

For spicy food to kill an average healthy person, you'd have to consume a few pounds of super hot peppers to get that sweet infarction. Ghost peppers come in around 1,000,000 scoville units and the one chip challenge is seasoned with vipers and reapers which come in under 2m (there's no official scoville rating that I could find on the chip itself). Some of the nastier sauces (Pure Evil and Plutonium No. 9) come in between 10m and 13m and those are eaten by heat aficionados and idiots looking to prove something with no more ill effects than shitting yourself inside out and pouring milk on your brown eye to relieve the burning.

The story about that kid is absolutely tragic. He was 14 with cardiomegaly and myocardial bridging of the left anterior descending coronary artery (enlarged heart and a congenital defect). I don't know if he was previously diagnosed (that's a whole discussion about our healthcare system in the US) but eating a chip like that at 14 with other conditions is a health decision. He didn't know the risks because there was no health warning and possibly he didn't know about his condition.