May 17, 2017
Two of the most memorable scenes from "Along Came Polly" and "Dumb and Dumber" involve the ingestion, intentional or otherwise, of extremely spicy foods—the sort that a movie can spin as perspiring and even fatal. In real life, though?
A chef in North Wales (United Kingdom, not Montgomery County) has reportedly developed the world's hottest chili pepper, one so pungent it could send a person into anaphylactic shock, according to The Daily Post.
Hobby grower Mike Smith, owner of Tom Smith's Plants, cultivated the Dragon's Breath chili pepper in tandem with Nottingham University. The goal was to find an alternative anesthetic that would help those with allergies receive pain-numbing medical attention.
The spiciness of chili peppers is often measured using the Scoville scale, a subjective test of a panel's sensitivity to capsaicin, the ingredient that gives the vegetable (and your metabolism) its kick.
Prior to Dragon's Breath, the world record holder was the Carolina Reaper, which registers at approximately 2.2 million Scoville heat units. Smith's chili pepper comes in at 2.48m Scoville heat units, meaning one drop of the capsicum oil in Dragon's Breath would be detectable in 2.48 million drops of water.
""It’s not been tried orally," Smith told The Daily Post. "I’ve tried it on the tip of my tongue and it just burned and burned. I spat it out in about 10 seconds."
If you were to ingest Dragon's Breath, it might burn your airways to the point that they close up.
No wonder pepper spray is a weapon of national defense.
