Lifestyle

Man Develops a Hole in His Esophagus After Eating a Ghost Pepper

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Tony Maples Photography

 

Ghost peppers, also called Bhut Jolokia, are known as one of the most excruciatingly hot peppers in the world. According to an article on KXAN.com, a man recently spent nearly a month in the hospital from eating one of these ridiculously spicy peppers. They write, “The man had eaten a hamburger smothered with a ghost pepper puree as part of contest. It was so hot it caused a two-and-a half centimeter tear in his esophagus.”

Are ghost peppers really that terrifyingly hot? Apparently yes, they are. Many videos on YouTube show people who were dared to eat a ghost pepper raw, and they usually end up in agony, sweating, hiccuping and crying. The website Pepper Scale actually says to “be scared” of this pepper! They say it’s “107 to 417 times hotter” than a jalapeño.

Sometimes the ghost pepper is used to heat up a sauce a little bit, but it isn’t as powerful as chowing down into a raw pepper. On the Scoville Heat Unit scale, this pepper ranks 855,000 – 1,041,427. That means that it would take around 900,000 cups of sugar-water to dilute one cup of ghost pepper’s heat down to nothing. For reference, a cup of poblano pepper would only need 1,500 cups of sugar-water.