Another Fourth of July meant another round of Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest, but few people realize the physical toll it takes on the competitors’ bodies.
Patrick Bertoletti won the title on Thursday after consuming 58 hot dogs and buns in 10 minutes at the event in Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York.
That’s more than 15,000 calories and quadruples the recommended daily amount of salt and fat for an adult in a single sitting.
In the women’s category, Miki Sudo won her tenth title, devouring 51 hot dogs and buns and setting a new women’s world record.
Studies suggest that devouring dozens of sausages in one sitting stretches the stomach to four times its normal size, turning it into “a hugely distended sac of food that takes up most of the upper abdomen.”
Patrick Bertoletti won the title on Thursday after consuming 58 hot dogs and buns in 10 minutes at the event in Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York.
In the women’s category, Miki Sudo won her tenth title, devouring 51 hot dogs and buns.
Experts warn that over time, this could eventually cause the body to stop emptying solid foods, leaving competitive eaters with intractable nausea and vomiting.
The true health effects of competitive eating are not well understood because it is such a new phenomenon that studying it in the general public would be considered unethical.
Competitive eaters also spend months stretching out their stomachs using “dangerous” techniques such as “water loading” or drinking gallons of milk and eating mountains of cabbage and fibrous foods.
According to Nathan’s nutritional information websiteOne of their original Coney Island beef hot dogs with natural casing contains 170 calories, 16 grams of fat (including 6 grams of saturated fat) and 480 milligrams of sodium.
This means that the male winner, Bertoletti, consumed 9,860 calories in 10 minutes, not including bread.
Each muffin has 130 calories, bringing the total to 17,400 — twice the number of calories the CDC recommends an adult male consume each week.
High sodium intake is enough to spike blood pressure, which can lead to a heart attack or stroke. The recommended sodium level is no more than 2,300 milligrams per day – just under five hot dogs.
And the high fat content can cause nausea, diarrhea and gastrointestinal upset, said Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics spokeswoman Debbie Petitpain. CBS News.
However, experts said that as long as these competitors return to eating normally, their bodies should also return to normal.
Legendary hot dog eater Joey “Jaws” Chestnut, who has won the competition 16 times, said he trains for each Nathan’s contest for three months straight, doing oral exercises to strengthen his mouth and throat.
“Every practice I record it and try to push myself a little bit harder and figure out what I can do differently,” Chestnut said in 2021.
WHO LET THE DOGS OUT: People dressed up as hot dogs in a parking lot in Coney Island, New York
“You can only practice so much. If I practice too much I start gaining weight, and if I start gaining weight I start losing my rhythm. It’s a weird double-edged sword. You have to love food, but you can’t eat so much that it becomes unhealthy.”
The first Nathan’s hot dog eating contest, held in 1972, was won by Jason Schechter, who ate only 14 hot dogs.
While it is unclear why the amount consumed has changed over the decades, it was likely because people trained for months to expand their stomachs.
A 2007 study conducted by the University of Pennsylvania looked at a 29-year-old man who was among the top 10 in the world in eating competitions.
The man was asked to ingest a high-density barium and effervescent agent before eating hot dogs for 12 minutes, allowing researchers to see how the food moved through his body.
Another group of regular eaters consumed seven sausages before reporting symptoms of illness.
After the study, it was shown that the competitive eater’s stomach could expand as he consumed the food.
‘The key to success in competitive fast eating is the ability to slowly train and adapt the stomach so that it can expand and dilate to a remarkable degree, allowing the fast eater to consume an extraordinary volume of food in an extremely short time (possibly superimposed on an innately docile stomach),’ according to the published article.
The team compared a competitive eater to “a predatory carnivore that periodically gorges itself on its prey, ingesting huge amounts of food to sustain itself until it captures another prey days or even weeks later.”
However, these eaters may also lose the feeling of satiety and satisfaction when they eat regularly.
The researchers noted that there is not enough data to predict what will happen to competitive eaters.
The team wrote in the study that there is a potential risk that the distended, flaccid stomach could eventually decompensate, turning into a huge sac unable to shrink to its original size and empty of solid food.
