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Eating a Carolina Reaper is literally like eating fire, some describe it as “eating molten lava”. It is the hottest chili in the world and is not suitable for all palates. If you don’t tolerate spice very well, we recommend that you don’t even go near it, let alone try it. The opposite is true for Canadian Mike Jack, who has just beaten his own Guinness speed record by ingesting this spicy chili that is pure fire. If in his previous feat he had managed to eat 50 units in a short time, last Tuesday he pulverized this feat by consuming that amount in just 6 minutes and 49.2 seconds -a new record- and, in addition, he subsequently ate a total of 135 Carolina Reaper chili peppers.
Although Mike Jack has been training his stomach on the spice for more than 20 years, he evidently still notices the sensation. “The first chili is the worst. The initial shock of the spiciness is intense. The second one doesn’t seem so bad, but each subsequent one gets hotter and hotter as the peppers touch new places in your mouth,” he commented after breaking the record. A sensation that also carries over to the stomach. “I get bad cramps. It’s like someone is squeezing and twisting my guts. Your mind tells you to stop, but you have to convince yourself to keep pushing,” Mike explained.
According to the protagonist, the pain usually lasts about 14 hours, but on this occasion not so much because he vomited most of the chili peppers. One of the drinks capable of relieving the intense sensation of the spiciness is milk, but Mike is a vegan so he does not drink it. What he usually does do is drink coconut water to replenish electrolytes and eat “heavy food” to further dilute the chili bell pepper remnants in his stomach.
Despite such a feat, Mike is in second place in the League of Fire Reaper Challenge, a ranking that records the most chilies eaten in a single session, not based on time. in terms of number of chilies eaten in a single session. The ranking is led by Gregory ‘Iron Guts’ Barlow, who ate 160 in one sitting.
Would you be able to eat even one unit of the world’s hottest chili, or would you even break the record?