Can you hurt yourself eating chilli peppers?
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Re: Can you hurt yourself eating chilli peppers?
#2As someone who enjoys a good hot sauce or pepper, I was interested in this article. Have I done damage to myself by eating 5 million+ scoville sauces?
Unfortunately, this article is almost completely devoid of real information, and doesn't answer the question at all.
Re: Can you hurt yourself eating chilli peppers?
#3tl;dr: Nothing long-term, but pain neurons might die off by prolonged/repeated exposure based on animal tests.
Re: Can you hurt yourself eating chilli peppers?
#4Re: Can you hurt yourself eating chilli peppers?
#5As someone who enjoys a good hot sauce or pepper, I was interested in this article. Have I done damage to myself by eating 5 million+ scoville sauces? Unfortunately, this article is almost completely devoid of real information, and doesn't answer the question at all.
I though the article covered the question and was very informative: the only after-affect we've been able to show is the possible, eventual dulling of the pain neurons involved.
Re: Can you hurt yourself eating chilli peppers?
#6The resturant they're talking about is Burger Off, in Hove. They famously make you sign a disclaimer before you eat the burger. I've seen several people attempt it, and they've all regretted the decision.
Brighton also has an annual chilli festival. There's a chilli eating competition, and paramedics are often needed by the losers, sometimes the winners.
It's a bit stupid really, a bit like the teenage-boyish pursuit of unnecessarily strong marijuana, but whatever floats your boat I suppose.
Re: Can you hurt yourself eating chilli peppers?
#7As someone who enjoys a good hot sauce or pepper, I was interested in this article. Have I done damage to myself by eating 5 million+ scoville sauces? Unfortunately, this article is almost completely devoid of real information, and doesn't answer the question at all.
There's at least some concession to the title in the third to the last paragraph:
But, hours or a day or so of very serious discomfort aside, there don’t seem to be long-term dangers, per se, in eating very hot peppers. Biologists have observed, however, that administering capsaicin over long periods of time in young mammals does result in the death of the pain neurons, Bryant says. Setting the neurons off repeatedly wears them out, and they don’t grow back.
Re: Can you hurt yourself eating chilli peppers?
#8When I was a kid, I sat across from a guy eating chips and salsa with sweat pouring down his face. I asked him if it was hot (pointing to the sause) and he snapped back, "No!".
To my surprise, I read about him in a local newspaper a few years ago. He apparently died from actually swallowing a lit charcoal covered in Pace Picante sauce.
not a true story
Re: Can you hurt yourself eating chilli peppers?
#9tl;dr: Nothing long-term, but pain neurons might die off by prolonged/repeated exposure based on animal tests.
Meaning your tolerance doesn't wear off, and you only become more bad ass the more you keep eating close to your tolerance level.
Re: Can you hurt yourself eating chilli peppers?
#10As someone who enjoys a good hot sauce or pepper, I was interested in this article. Have I done damage to myself by eating 5 million+ scoville sauces? Unfortunately, this article is almost completely devoid of real information, and doesn't answer the question at all.
Spicy is pleasurable to me, but nothing beyond the 350K Scoville range. I can't even fathom 1M Scoville, not to speak of 5M+ Scoville. How do you recover from that?
The article prompted me to ask why our pain neurons interpret the capsaicin burn the approximately the same as a temperature burning sensation. It turns out we don't fully know yet [1]. Some spice hound is going to score big time doing graduate thesis work on answering this question, literally eating spicy food for science.
[1] http://indianapublicmedia.org/amomentofscience/chili-peppers...