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- A new study examines how rapidly competitive eaters have expanded their capacity over four decades.
- Dipping hot dogs and buns in water, or Tang orange beverage, helps them go down.
- But to hold dozens of hot dogs and buns, competitors' stomachs and esophagi must stretch and relax over time.
Science has revealed some critical answers to a question that keeps many Americans up at night: How do competitive eaters fit that many hot dogs in their digestive systems?
A researcher analyzed almost 40 years of Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest data to draw some conclusions. Competitive eaters have expanded their capacity by leaps and bounds, but how is that working, and what impact will it have on their long-term health?
Using data from 39 qualifying contests, researcher James Smoliga, who studies human physiology and sports medicine at High Point University, analyzed the data for trends over time. Smoliga threw out all data from contests that were too short, and some years didn’t have records available. Even so, 39 years qualified, with 10-minute contests where officials recorded all the data.
Smoliga turned the number of hot dogs and the total time into a measure of eating speed called active consumption rate (ACR).
“Through nonlinear modelling and generalized extreme value analysis, I show that humans are theoretically capable of achieving an ACR of approximately 832 [grams per minute] fresh matter over 10 min duration,” he explains in the paper. “If one assumes that early contest winners represent the high-end of ‘untrained’ humans, an average person may be capable of a fresh matter ACR of approximately 100 [grams per minute] and consume approximately 3000 kcal in 10 minutes.”
Theoretically, that means a human can stuff an astonishing 84 hot dogs down his or her gullet in 10 minutes. For reference, Joey Chestnut—the undisputed G.O.A.T. in this disgustingly impressive field of athletics—set a record with 75 dogs at the most recent edition of the annual contest.
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Three-thousand calories in 10 minutes already sounds preposterous, although less so in the era of mukbang on YouTube (where people eat enormous amounts of food just to entertain viewers) and the Cheesecake Factory menu (where even a salad might have 1,900 calories). But turning 100 grams per minute into over 800 involves reshaping the inside of the digestive system. Smoliga explains:
“Modelling individual performances across 5 years reveals that maximal ACR significantly increases over time in ‘elite’ competitive eaters, likely owing to training effects. Extreme digestive plasticity suggests that eating competition records are quite biologically impressive, especially in the context of carnivorous species and other human athletic competitions.”
This fits with a recent WIRED profile of Chestnut, who’s been studied for years partly because of his unprecedented dominance of his sport, but has lost more events in recent years. WIRED's Nick Thompson talked with gastroenterologist and University of Pennsylvania researcher David Metz, who in 2007 “found that the competitive eater’s stomach was able ‘to form an enormous flaccid sac’ capable of housing endless food, with more piling up in the oesophagus, which could be stretched out over time,” Thompson writes.
In that profile, Chestnut says he views training for competitive eating as an engineering problem. That means raising his ACR over time has been intentional and the result of a training regiment, like a Rocky montage, but with gallons of water and dozens of weiners instead of an intimidating flight of stairs. But at what cost? Metz warns of harm to the gastrointestinal tract in his 2007 paper, and Smoliga draws a similar conclusion.
“The rate of performance progression of competitive eaters far exceeds that from athletes in mainstream sports,” the scientist writes, “but the physiological adaptations to achieve this may be indicative of training-induced digestive dysfunction.”
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