'One Chip Challenge' pulled from shelves after mother says spicy tortilla chip contributed to her son's death
'One Chip Challenge' pulled from shelves after mother says spicy tortilla chip contributed to her son's death
Paqui's spicy tortilla chip product was sold in a coffin-shaped container.
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.
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I think that tens of thousands of people have done it and this is the first fatality says that it was something unique about the victim, rather than the chip.
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Please see @WHYAREWEALLCAPS' repost of the NYT article below. This is the first fatality, but not the first hospitalization of a child.
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woah be careful you're about to dismantle the whole anti vax argument if you keep talking like that
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Sorry I'll wait for the final report. Something was almost certainly fucked up with that kid before hand.
They are hot, but no fuckin way do I believe for a second that chip killed that kid without subs freakish underlying condition.
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This. There's no known mechanism by which oral capsaicin can kill someone, and millions of these chips have been sold and eaten without incident. They've been on the market for 7 years. You'll notice even the article is careful to say that the chip "was implicated in" his death, or that "his mother believes the chip caused his death", but no one will actually say the chip killed him. This is because they don't know what happened at all. It makes sense to pull it from the shelf and I'm glad they did that while they figure out what happened, but unbeknownst to me everyone on Lemmy is a post hoc pathologist because we're all talking like we know for sure the chip killed the kid. Sometimes life is too complicated for common sense, you know?
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My guess is allergy to one of the peppers in it, but I guess we have to wait for the autopsy to be sure.
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Something was almost certainly fucked up with that kid before hand.
Well sure, but the chip still contributed to his death.Like, if someone has a skull as thin as an eggshell and you—unknowing—slap that guy and he dies, you still killed him even if someone with a normal skull would’ve been fine.Edit: The Snickers comparison is a much better one, thank you. I rescind my point.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I read elsewhere that the 2023 chip does in fact no longer include the blue coloring.
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People are calling this kid stupid. I disagree.
Nobody buying food in America would think that a single serving product would be able to kill you without any sort of prior health conditions. This is a completely fair assumption and one that is important.
Second, the one chip challenge has been in the public eye for a while. There are multiple examples of people eating them successfully in previous years. When things do go badly, it's usually something along the lines of "I threw up everywhere". That's a far cry from dying and along the lines of risks teenagers have taken for decades.
Third, a ton of food items use the skull and crossbones motif. I've seen it on hot sauces that aren't even that spicy. Nobody assumes that the skull and crossbones means risking death. This is, again, because everyone assumes that food is generally safe to eat.
In conclusion, don't sell things in convenience stores that can kill an otherwise healthy person in short order. While this is especially true for children, it's a good rule of thumb in general.
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The chip has been safe to eat for millions of people for years.
Capsaicin consumed orally isn't fatal. This kid probably has some other underlying health problems he was simply not aware of, but it's not like it's an inherently lethal product. If a kid with an unknown peanut allergy eats and dies from a Snickers, it's not like Snickers are actually a lethal food.
It does say it's intended for adults only, but that's hardly ever stopped teenagers from doing anything ever. It's probably good they pulled it temporarily, but the real answer here is probably simply "Don't sell this to minors."
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there is also the possibility that the ship was contaminated with some at the factory. Maybe a cleaning chemical got in the chip
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Why are people taking it for granted that peppers can kill you? They almost never, if ever, do. No, they can't, in a practical sense, and it's very weird you're immediately ready to believe that they do
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Third, a ton of food items use the skull and crossbones motif. I've seen it on hot sauces that aren't even that spicy.
Even regular water can have morbid branding https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_Death
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I thought this is the kind of thing the FDA is for. If it can kill a 14 year old then why was it allowed?
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Pretty sure that's the law actually
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Meh.
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Even as someone who loves really spicy foods, I think the ever-escalating spicy trend is getting ridiculous. After a certain point you don't taste anything and its just a dumb one-upsmanship contest.
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People would litterly send men to the moon just to one up each other.
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Same. Also some people just don't seem to be able to identify any flavor beneath the heat.
My limit is this one Asian food place in Houston. I got some chicken that I didn't realize was hot. Me and my coworkers go back to the office (a very large room). I open that to go box and everyone in the room choked from the heat of just the smell. It was strong even from the other side of this room that's probably 80x80ft room with 40ft ceilings.
I was crying, sweating, turning red, nose running everything. Everybode else was getting a little bit of bloodshot eyes.
Of course then everyone tried convincing me to eat the pepper itself. Ain't no way.
When I was finished we wraped it in like 3 plastic bags and took it outside and down the sidewalk and put it in a trashcan there.
But that was some damn good chicken. 5 stars, would suffer again.
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Sounds like you all had a great time.
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As a lover of spicy foods, and more importantly, a late 30s fella, I agree completely. If you don't enjoy it, what's the point?
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I'm tired of restaurants basically wafting a Carolina Reaper over their salsas or sauces and advertising their barely-jalapeno-grade garbage as being particularly spicy. One drop of extract in a bulk batch of sauce for a restaurant does not make it spicy, but it certainly lets vanilla consumers with no real tolerance feel like they're able to take actual heat from real peppers.
I love spicy food and I've done the One Chip Challenge just for the thrill, but it's not really done as a "food" any more than skydiving is done for transportation. It arguably shouldn't be sold to minors, but it's actually hot, not just marketing, and arguably is more responsible for creating the trend in the first place than jumping on the bandwagon later. The Challenge has been sold for a long time.
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I think Popeyes or Wendy's was advertising some ghost pepper sandwich recently and it was decent and had a little bit of a kick, but it was far from being hot. Same thing with various "hot" chips.
If it is a mass market brand I have very low expectations when it comes to spice level. If it had the slightest vit of a kick, I'm surprised.
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It's not really sold as a food. It's sold as a game. That's why it's called the "one chip challenge". You're supposed to eat it and then hold out as long as possible without driving something to sedate the burn.
It's also not that spicy. Last time I had it, I was mostly coughing from the stale chip and dry, powdery seasoning. The heat itself didn't bother me. Their regular sized bags of chips were way spicier to me.
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More responsible than gun manufacturers.
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The point of chips is to feed you the point of a gun is to kill. Why would they pull their product for doing what it's supposed to.
I agree with you though.
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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.
This is about the most wasteful product I've ever encountered. You wrap one chip in plastic to keep it fresh and then throw cardboard around it with tons of empty space and then ship those on trucks?! What the fuck.
I support killing this product on its environmental harm whether it's implicated in the teen's death or not.
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One of my favorite bits from Futurama is when Fry is using some "make your own Oreo cookie" device that has individually wrapped cookies and individually wrapped cream, so he'd open each one, toss the plastic, smush them together just to take them apart like some people do with Oreos.
Hilarious and horrifying because you just know we have products like that today lol
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Great reference. I remember that and it made me smile in horror.
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On a 'plastic per calories' scale this is very wasteful indeed. But actually it is not just a chip, its more of an activity being sold. Other activities are much worse resource-wise. Some people go skydiving, others eat a chip at home.
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Yeah, it's not actually a food. Nobody eats these for the taste or calories. It's purely for the experience of the challenge and the packaging is understandably part of that experience. It's still wasteful, but it's the kind of society we live in. Packaging works. If they could sell as well with less waste, I'm sure they would. The packaging is a calculated attempt at maximizing the experience, especially under the assumption that it's going to spread by viral videos.
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Don't check out Japan
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But hey, they have square watermelons!
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Tbf I would assume there's not much volume being sold, considering it's definitely at most a serving being packaged. Afaik nobody is out there buying a handful of these to eat as a snack.
EDIT: based on the other comments, it seems like the average consumer buys at most one of these in their lifetime, haha.
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Yeah, this sounds like a case where if they packaged it like other chips, it would just mean instead of throwing out a small amount of plastic per chip eaten, you're throwing out a chip bag worth of plastic along with most of the other chips after you and maybe some friends take one.
It's like buying the bigger size that's slightly more expensive only to realize it would have been cheaper to buy the smaller one because the extra stuff got thrown out after it went bad plus there's extra packaging, even if the value per unit is worse.
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This was my first thought. This must be peak "we don't give a shit if our climate will kill us tomorrow"
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Idk how the legal accusations stand up, as there are warnings and liability disclaimers everywhere on it...
I've eaten it, most of my friends have, and we were fine. But I've known others who reacted much more strongly to just a crumb, so I can see how with preexisting conditions that could happen.
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In doing some research, I found that there have been quite a few people reporting stomacheaches and being hospitalized from previous years of the chip. There's also been a case of 15 year old dying from a stroke caused by the Carolina Reaper pepper. I hate to say it, but I think that maybe we're taking these peppers too far to the point that they are becoming hazardous to our health.
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Wanting to prove how tough you are to others who may or may not even care has always been hazardous to one's health. We're only about a decade past a challenge to eat laundry detergent.
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anyone born after 2008 can't cook... all they know is mcdonald's , charge they phone, play Roblox, eat hot chip & die
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I enjoyed your downvoted meme reference.
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I feel bad for laughing. It's offical. We are both bad people.
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And talk shit over wifi cause they phone never on.
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I had the hottest one one time and legitimately thought I was going to have to go to the hospital. I ate it around 1PM and my entire rest of my day was gone to extreme sickness like I've never experienced before. To this day I get very sick feeling any time I smell something similar to it.
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I love spicy foods but the super hot peppers are just different. Even a small amount in food where it doesn't taste spicy will wreck my gi tract for at least 24 hours. Shit ain't natural
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this is hands down a 'shit happens' events. its not always someones fault someone gets hurt.
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Goes to show that we know so little still about gut biology.
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Any idea how many scovilles these things are?
It wasn't too long ago that I had a habit of using 600,000 scoville unit hot sauce on things. Now I'm wondering if I was taking my life in my hands every time I had that sauce.
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Likely more than 2 million.
The kid likely had a preexisting condition or maybe some genetic disposition as hundreds if not thousands of people eat food at that heat level each day without incident.
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If you built up to it and you don't get a negative reaction youll be fine. Spouse eats super spicy, to me, just fine. I'll occassionally put a little of it and I'm get a runny nose, flop sweat and a bowel movement with half an hour after eating. These people probably dont eat a lot of spicy food. Its like running a marathon straight from being a couch potato. Your body is not ready for that.
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The article says:
Carolina Reapers score around 1.7 million Scoville heat units and Naga Viper peppers around 1.4 million.
I've had dried naga pepper in food a few times, it's not nice. It burns all the way through, I could feel it burning in my stomach. I ended up throwing up rather than dealing with it. I'll gladly stick to the much tastier scotch bonnets (100-350k SHU).
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A fresh Carolina Reaper ranks somewhere around 1.6 million scoville. I grew a bush of em last year, they're evil little things. I ended up just composting them.
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I don't have any opinion on the safety of the chip, but I'm glad it's being discontinued just because of the over indulgent packaging.
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Surprisingly good take. I agree
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Oh... that's why the ampm down the street had them fully stocked one day and then the whole display was gone the next. I didn't even get a chance to try it.
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A coworker of mine tried it one time while he was on the clock. He ended up having to go to the ER. They gave him something that coated his stomach (or at least that's how he described it). He wasn't fired or anything (and I don't think he should've been, anyway), but people generally thought it was a pretty stupid move.
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My god people are fucking stupid.