After reading the ‘fact’, one Twitter user remarked that their ‘whole life had been a lie’.
Bengaluru: A tweet claiming that all coloured bell peppers come from the same plant has gone viral over the past week.
OK so I've just found out that green peppers turn yellow then orange then red and they're actually all the same pepper just less ripe and my mind is blown
— Amy (@callmeamye) September 11, 2018
It has attracted so much attention that several websites, including the BBC, have covered it, writing articles and creating videos about this astounding “fact”.
However, it isn’t true.
While it is a fact that green peppers change colour, they do not go from a second colour to a third one.
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Red, yellow, orange, purple and other colours of peppers are all genetically different — in short, different coloured peppers come from different plants. It’s just that the first stage of colouring is always green. Depending on the type of pepper seed, the green capsicum then changes to one specific colour upon ripening.
these 3 bell peppers were grown (by me) on different plants and went from green to their respective color. pic.twitter.com/kA5pBIYctf
— jōj (@gojarbe) September 14, 2018
Just like in fruits, ripened capsicum has better nutritional value, being higher in vitamin A, vitamin C, beta carotene, and sugar than its green form.
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In addition to this bit of misinformation, another viral tweet in the responses brought back the ever-popular hoax that bell peppers are sexed.
But some peppers are male and some are female.
— Everyday Aimee (@EverydayAims) September 12, 2018
This is a popular hoax, according to which a capsicum with four bumps at the bottom is female, while three bumps signify a male.
Capsicum and all peppers of the family, including jalapeños and red/green chillies, are hermaphrodites. This means that they have both the male and female sex organs (stamen and pistil) in each plant and thus do not produce male or female offspring.
The viral nature of such tweets has consistently prompted practitioners and experts of a given field to create Twitter accounts for communicating accurate information about their subject.
I actually made a twitter account only after seeing so much misinformation about peppers being spread.
As someone who grows peppers, the information that green bell peppers turn yellow then orange then red was mind-blowing… because it’s false, unfortunately.#peppers
— M. Grome – PhD – Post-doc Yale (@GromeMichael) September 14, 2018
But needless to say, viral false tweets never get taken down, and clarifications seldom get even a fraction of the attention the original false one does.