Originally published at: The capsaicin chile fire challenge is maybe a bad idea | Boing Boing
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I like spicy foods but it seems like a lot of these “challenges” have gone way, way beyond any meaningful culinary context and are just a way to show off who can endure the most severe chemical burns. And they can be serious! In addition to severe damage to the gastrointestinal tract, just getting a little speck of the capsaicin oil in your eye can cause permanent damage. That happened to a friend of mine with some hot sauce that’s probably considered tame by the standards of some of this latest stuff.
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Important side note:
The sensation of spiciness that you ‘taste’ is not due to normal taste bud function —like sweet, sour, bitter, or umami flavors— but through distinct capsaicin receptors to which capsaicin binds, creating the pain-like spiciness that we enjoy [in certain quantities].
BUT, as anyone who has ventured into the million+ end of the Scoville scale knows…you also have capsaicin receptors in your butthole!
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Will researchers be able to perform cell-seq. with this stuff running amok? Find out what lives and dies or what kind of NK cell lipidosis goes on? Nah? https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.02.474733v1.full.pdf (Well maybe it blocks salmonella infection?) Huh. Well, maybe it’ll prolong the lives of sulfur harvesters and other career-limiting careers. Make us exude all the plastics we ever ate out our faces…eh…
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Good rule of thumb: Pretty much any phrase containing the word “challenge” that originated on the internet is a bad idea.
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Agreed, “-challenge” is internet-ese for watch me do something really foolish.
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You don’t need to venture that far into the Scoville scale to learn that chiles burn twice… and can also find ulcers.
It’s just a rephrasing of “Hold my beer and watch this.”
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