A 14-year-old Teenager Dies Of A Heart Attack After Following Tortilla Spicy Chip Eating Challenges

Illustration of Tolilla chips. (Unsplash/Olga Kozachenko)

JAKARTA - A teenager with a congenital disease breathed his last after following a challenge of eating spicy chips.

The head of the medical examiner's office in Massachusetts, United States, named a teenager who ate Tolilla chips containing high concentration chemical compounds found in chilies, died of a heart attack last September.

His name is Harris Wolobah. The victim had a congenital heart disorder, trying Paqui's "One Chip Challenge" which was very spicy when he ate tortilla chips peppered with Carolina total chilies and Naga Viper chilies.

The head of the medical examiner's office on Thursday confirmed to CNN, as quoted on May 17, Walobah died of cardiac arrest after eating foodstuffs "with a high concentration of capsaicin."

Capsaicin is a spicy chemical that occurs naturally in chilies.

Carolina Pepper is under pepper on a Scoville scale, which measures pepper and chili levels.

Meanwhile, the Dragon Viper is slightly hotter, with a scale of 1.2 million hot units. It's much hotter than jalapecuro chilies, which have a high level of about 5,000 hot units.

"Paqui's One Chip Challenge is aimed at adults only, with a clear and prominent labeling highlighting that this product is not for children or anyone who is sensitive to spicy food or with certain health conditions," a Paqui spokesperson told CNN.

"We are seeing an increase in reports about teenagers and other individuals not heeding this warning. As a result, even though the product meets food safety standards, because it is very careful, we are working with retailers to voluntarily withdraw the product from the shelves in September 2023," he continued.

The spokesperson added that "One Chip Challenge has been stopped."

The company's website says it will reimburse consumers' money for the 2023 Paqui Carolinaung + Naga Viper Pepper One Chip Challenge which has not been eaten.

Paqui himself voluntarily pulled the product, which was packed in a coffin-shaped box, from the shelves following Wolobah's death in September.