You will beat your everyday chicken in most competitions, be it mathematics, cooking or even 'number of doors opened in a minute'. In fact in almost every competition you could beat a chicken using either your natural gifts or by getting a little creative to beat the feathered fiend. There is, however, one competition in which you will meet your match: hot chilli eating.

When it comes to chillies, some folk just can't seem to get enough. At the 2011 'Fiery Foods UK' Chilli-Eating contest in Brighton, contestants pushed themselves to endure mind-numbingly hot chillies, culminating with the Chilli Pepper Pete Naga with a Scoville Heat Unit (SHU) rating of just over 1,000,000. To put this fireball into perspective, your common Jalapeno chilli has an SHU rating of only 2,500-5,000 (pure capsaicin has a SHU rating of around 16,000,000). But if 200 times spicier than a Jalapeno isn't hot enough for you, last year a team from New Mexico announced the newest holder of the 'World's Hottest Chilli' title: the Moruga Scorpion chilli. This monster was recorded as having a SHU rating of 2,009,231, spicy enough to knock your socks off and set them on fire, just to make sure.

Chilli peppers exert their sweltering effect on you due to a molecule called capsaicin; capsaicin binds to receptor proteins that have a very long and complicated name: Transient Receptor Potential Vanilloid Receptor type 1 but most people just call them TRPV1 for short (pronounced tripV1). These receptors are found on your pain neurons and respond to heat so that you can sense dangerously high temperatures. When the capsaicin molecule binds, it changes the properties of the receptor protein and causes it to require far less heat energy to activate causing the receptor and neuron to activate at normal temperatures.

Now, you might be wondering what this has to do with chickens and chilli eating contests. Your everyday chicken, and most other birds for that matter, have a very slightly different sequence of amino acid building blocks in their TRPV1 protein. The modified amino acid sequence causes a tiny change to the shape of the protein that stops capsaicin from binding but still allows TRPV1 to function in detecting high temperatures. The capsaicin molecule simply has no effect on the receptor. This lets the chicken go wild on the chillies, even jump into a pool of them if it were so inclined.

If you were to try the 'Moruga Scorpion' you'd most likely end up on the floor, gasping for breath as a crumpled pile of tears and sweating but a chicken will eat it up like popcorn during the adverts before a movie. He will eat the lot and come back for seconds, and in a chilli eating contest that makes for one fowl opponent. Your safest option? Give up, or you'll just come out red in the face.

Want the details?

Bosland, P. W., Coon, D. & Reeves, G. (2012) 'Trinidad Moruga Scorpion' Pepper is the World's Hottest Measured Chile Pepper at More Than Two Million Scoville Heat Units. HortTechnology. 22 (4): 534-538

Caterina et al. (1997) The capsaicin receptor: a heat-activated ion channel in the pain pathway. Nature 389: 816-824

Jordt, S-E. & Julius, D. (2002) Molecular Basis for Species-Specific Sensitivity to "Hot" Chili Peppers. Cell. 108: 421-430