Lethally spicy hot sauce causes heart attack in an otherwise healthy eater

Chili Peppers iStockphoto

A year or so ago we ran an FYI story on whether you could die from eating too many chili peppers. We said probably not, reasoning that it would take an impossible amount of peppers to do lethal damage. Well, take it easy on those hots; we’ve been proven wrong. Andrew Lee, a 33-year-old forklift driver from Edlington, Doncaster in the U.K., dared his girlfriend’s brother to eat a spoonful of a hot sauce Andrew had made from home-grown chilies. Andrew then ate a plate of the sauce, complained of itching before bed, and suffered a fatal heart attack by morning. Tests are still being run, but in the meantime it appears that it was indeed the spice that caused the attack.

4 Comments

I have a vial of Blair's 16 Million Reserve that I live in fear of, I wonder where this rates. The hottest I've actually used was The Source, 7.1 million scovilles and that was a bad idea.

james1976

from Roxboro, NC

Sounds awful....poor guy......

I grew some habanero peppers once with out realizing the what they really where.......something I will never forget.

I wounder what reaction in his body caused him to have a heart attack?

The following is a excerpt from Wikipedia:

"Capsaicin is a highly irritant material requiring proper ........ Severe over-exposure to pure capsaicin can result in death; the lethal dose (LD50 in mice) is 47.2 mg/kg."

I guess too much of a good thing :(

Omg...i should really stop eating so many spicy foods. :0

Omg...i should really stop eating so many spicy foods. :0



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