He’s paraglided over the Himalayas, escaped from quicksand and snacked on a still-wriggling snake. But a few months ago, Bear Grylls finally met up with a challenge he couldn’t handle. “This nomadic tribe in the Sahara offered me raw goat testicles,” says Grylls, 33, the star of the Discovery Channel’s survival series Man vs. Wild. “As an honored guest, I ate one. It’s just everything you’d imagine. It was the first time I’ve vomited on the series.”

Just another hazard of Grylls’ gig as the MacGyver of the wild. In the series, whose third season premiered Nov. 9, he hurls himself (often by parachute) into inhospitable locales, then shows his audience how to survive using skills he honed in the British army’s Special Air Service, an elite unit trained in parachute jumping and desert and winter warfare. An enthusiastic showman, Grylls (actual first name: Edward) climbs cliffs, swims rapids, eats any critter he can catch and, when the going gets hot, wraps a urine-soaked T-shirt around his head to prevent heatstroke. “I spend a lot of time thinking, ‘I’ve got to get a proper job. This is mad. I’m miserable,'” he says with a laugh, sipping peppermint tea (when not in survival mode, he’s a vegan). “But at the same time, I realize that all this is such a privilege.”

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He has been accused of being too privileged: This summer, news broke that he had sometimes bunked in comfy hotels instead of roughing it in the wild during taping. Episodes take about 10 days to make, explains Grylls: “The night stuff [shown on-camera] is all done for real. But when I’m not filming, I stay with the crew in some sort of a base camp.” Episodes now clarify when Grylls gets support from his crew and when situations are staged. “We should have done that from the start,” he says. “The more you see, the more real it feels.”