iStockphoto
You have to be a real glutton for punishment to willingly take a single bite of the infamously spicy Carolina Reaper pepper. However, one particularly masochistic competitive eater ate more than 100 of them while breaking his own world record even though he could’ve stopped long before he decided to tap out.
If you’re not familiar with the Carolina Reaper, it was invented by Ed Currie, a pepper breeder who set out to make the spiciest one on the planet and was rewarded by the Guinness Book of World Records for his efforts.
The average Carolina Reaper clocks in at 1,641,183 Scoville units (for the sake of comparison, a jalapeño tends to be between 2,000 and 8,000), but one pepper that was tested hit 2.2 million on that heat scale and Currie claims he’s sitting on some even spicier variations he’s developed since unleashing his creation on an unsuspecting world.
The Carolina Reaper serves as the basis for the “One Chip Challenge” that was recently yanked from shelves after being linked to the death of a teenager, but plenty of other people have voluntarily challenged themselves by taking on some other world records linked to the pepper.
That includes Mike Jack, a competitive eater hailing from Canada who recently set out to break the world record for the “fastest time to eat 50 Carolina Reapers,” and when everything was said and done, he managed to down that amount in 6:49.20 (he achieved the feat last year but it wasn’t officially verified until the end of September).
However, he wasn’t content with stopping there, as he also tried to set the “League of Fire” mark for the most consumed in a single sitting before cutting himself off at a whopping 135 (which was still 25 short of the 160 that Gregory “Iron Guts” Barlow downed at the same competition in 2022 to set the bar that’s yet to be topped).
Jack told the folks at Guinness he did what he could to ward off the side effects of consuming so many Carolina Reaper peppers by vomiting shortly after tapping out, and acknowledged the coconut water and “heavy foods” he deployed to cut down on the repercussions only do so much to minimize the pain and suffering that can linger for more than 12 hours.
What a madman.