A News Anchor Ate The World's Spiciest Tortilla Chip And Promptly Vomited On Air
What began as a silly-seeming throwaway segment on a Denver morning show ended with one of its contestants whimpering on the floor after throwing up, all thanks to a spicy tortilla chip.
The team at Denver's Channel 2 Daybreak thought it would be a good idea to take Paqui's "One Chip Challenge," which involves eating a single individually-packaged super-spicy tortilla chip. This chip isn't just spicy; it's loaded with the extracts of the super-spicy ghost pepper as well as the Carolina reaper, which until recently was the hottest pepper on the planet, clocking in at a face-melting 1.4 to 1.9 million Scoville units, the scale used to measure spiciness. For comparison's sake, a jalapeño tops out at around 8,000 Scoville units.
In the video, anchor Natalie Tysdal eats the chip alongside her colleagues, and seems to be doing okay at first (even taking a selfie) until she starts to ask "Can we lick our fi-" and can't get the rest of the sentence out. Then she doubles over, still keeping a brave smile on her face, and takes a sip of coffee. It all goes downhill from there: She collapses, disappearing from view (another colleague at this point laughingly announces that she's vomited — how nice of him!), and as her mic is still on, we can hear her making a terrible half-whimper, half-wheeze sound until the clip cuts to commercial. She sounds like she's literally dying.
As she later posted on Facebook, "I threw up, couldn't breathe and felt like fire was coming out of my mouth, nose and ears... An hour later I had chills and a massive headache. Three hours have gone by and I feel like I was beat up in a dark alley... CRAZY! I wouldn't recommend it."
We happen to have some of these chips lying around our office (they came in a box of 10, complete with black latex gloves for handling and bandanas saying "I've been to hell and back"), and after seeing this video we think we're going to abstain. A couple of us sampled these earlier this year: Both of our test subjects said that the chip was intensely spicy, and one ended up vomiting several hours later.
Thankfully, Tysdal is okay, but judging by her response to a comment on her Facebook post, she's learned a valuable lesson: When she's commended for being "very brave," she says that she "need[s] to not be so trusting of my coworkers."
If you want to take the One Chip Challenge for yourself for some reason, you can buy them here for $4.99 while supplies last. Or you can melt your face with one of these super-spicy foods.