LogFAQs > #975881336

AloneIBreak posted...

I didn't know shit could be spicy enough to kill someone, jesus.

I thought the same so I did a little bit of googling.

Mice and rats dosed orally with 96 to 200 mg/kg capsaicin demonstrated immediate salivation, convulsions, reddening of the skin, and dypsnea, or labored breathing. Animals either died within 26 minutes of dosing, or showed no further symptoms 24 hours after dosing.22

http://npic.orst.edu/factsheets/archive/Capsaicintech.html

A lethal dose of 50% of mice is around 22 mg/lb. Since this kid is probably around 120ish pounds. A chip having potentially 2640 mg of capsaicin could be lethal. Of course 22 mg/lb is just enough to kill half of a test group of mice and we extrapolate that to humans. It's possible 12 mg/lb is enough to kill 25% of mice. This kid could've been on the lower end of the curve. But the odds of a chip have 2.6 literal grams of capsaicin on it sounds insane. How much does a really hot pepper have in capsaicin?

Let's take a look at a scientific paper that measures this.
https://mendelnet.cz/pdfs/mnt/2017/01/96.pdf
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/9/5/3/AABn_6AAE0GB.jpg
A carolina reaper pepper without seeds has 81 mg/g. That's insanely high. A pepper can weigh like what 4-5 grams according to google? Usually spicy peppers are dehydrated however. So looking up dried pepper weight you can get 1 - 2 grams. Of course this is dehydrated which concentrates flavor assumedly. Does this paper mention the peppers are dehydrated?
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/9/5/4/AABn_6AAE0GC.png
Yes it does.
I'm curious about this dihydrocapsaicin, does it make things more spicy? Does the double bond in the chain make the capsaicin more potent?
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/9/5/5/AABn_6AAE0GD.png
-https://drugs.ncats.io/drug/W9BV32M08A
No apparently not. So let's ignore the amount of dihydrocapsaicin.
(looking more into it while editing this post BIG MISTAKE)
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/9/5/6/AABn_6AAE0GE.png

So let's theorize how much could this kid have ingested of capsaicin.
One Chip weighs about 6 grams.
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/9/5/7/AABn_6AAE0GF.jpg
We see it there, and oh? We know for a fact it has carolina reaper. Ok. How much does a normal chip weigh then in comparison? If we have a normal chip weight we can then compare how much carolina reaper dust is on the thing. Going by a tostitos chip 28gs for 7 chips which are roughly the same size we have a 4 gram chip. So we have 2-3 grams of carolina reaper and scorpion pepper dust on these things.

But we already have numbers on how much capsaicin a carolina reaper has. 2-3 grams of pure carolina dust would yield about...243 mgs of capsaicin (about 100mgs of dihydrocapsaicin). That's not enough. So I'm not sure what happened to him. Even assuming on the higher end, he couldn't have ingested any more than like 300-500 mgs of capsaicin. Even assuming higher amounts of capsaicin and him weighing less you'd need about 1.8 grams of capsaicin to be lethal for an 80 pound boy. I can't even get close to that and I'm sure the ld50 curves don't really reach that point. He must've been a statistical anomaly for him to have been killed by "spiciness."

TaylorHeinicke posted...

apparently he ate 16 of them

cant find an actual source though other than this

https://twitter.com/DailyLoud/status/1699142013684175300

SIXTEEN?

Well 16*243 is about 3888 mgs of capsaicin from carolina dust. It's on the higher end, but that is actually lethal dose range. I doubt someone eats 16 of those. Who opens 16 boxes and rips them up? Must've been a serious dare.

If he had a rare allergic reaction to one chip I'd believe that more than him eating 16 in a row. Like his esophagus just closed up and he couldn't breath but the reporting sucks on this. Especially with no one finding out he ate 16 in a row? Wtf.