the human body blueprint

pepper is still spicy, so it inherently has some variance. Even though a panel of judges taste the peppers to evaluate their spiciness, the human palette varies greatly from person to person, so spice tolerance is no exception. In more modern times, a high-performance liquid chromatography process (HPLC) can be used to determine the exact amount of capsaicin in a pepper, which eliminates the majority of human error from the process The HPLC measures pepper pungency in American Spice Trade Association Pungency Units. However, SHUs are still commonly used today by food critics and experts alike, so the measurements determined by the HPLC process are often plugged into a formula that converts them into SHUs.

To better understand SHUs and just how spicy some peppers are, it may be helpful to compare common household peppers and record-breaking spicy peppers in SHUs. For example, the regular jalapeno pepper has a SHU score of 2500-5000 while the “hottest pepper in the world”- the Carolina Reaper- measures over 2 2 million SHUs This means the Carolina Reaper is over 440 times spicier than a jalapeno- one bite of a Carolina Reaper is equivalent to more than 440 bites from a jalapeno pepper. So next time you think your high spice tolerance is high, you can humble yourself with a bite of the Carolina Reaper