The four-minute mile and the two-hour marathon were once thought impossible: now a new glove has been released for the world of elite competition. Scientific analysis suggests that competitive consumers have reached nine hot dogs at the limits of human performance.
The theoretical ceiling has been set at 84 hot dogs in 10 minutes. The current world record, set by Joey “Jaws” Chestnut earlier this month, is 75.
James Smoliga, a sports medicine specialist at High Point University in North Carolina, who authored the research, described 84 hot dogs as “the maximum possible limit for a Usain Bolt-type performance.”
The analysis is based on 39 years of historical data from Nathan’s famous hot dog feeding contest, an annual gluttony show held in Coney Island, New York, combined with the latest theory of sports science, using mathematical models to project trends in performance.
The composition and size of Hot Dog have reportedly not changed at Nathan’s Famous in the fast-food company’s 104-year history, allowing for a valid comparison between competitors over the years.
Improvement curves in elite sports, ranging from sprint to pole vault, tend to follow a so-called sigmoid curve, which features a slow and steady initial rise, followed by an era of rapid improvement and finally a leveling. “Eating hot dogs has definitely reached that second plateau,” Smoliga said.
The first years of Nathan’s contest featured a mixed bag of winners, mostly “big obese guys” who risked their luck that day, according to Smoliga. In 1984, the contest was won by Birgit Felden, a member of the 17-pound, 130-pound West German judo team, who handled nine hot dogs despite never having eaten one before the competition.
In the 1990s, the participation of extreme Japanese consumers changed the playing field. In 2001, Takeru Kobayashi shot down 50 hot dogs, breaking the previous record of 25,125.
“It was no longer just about people with great appetites,” Smoliga said.
Elite eaters began to follow elaborate training regimes, with some ingesting large volumes of liquids or gels to expand the stomach without having to process calories. This year’s winner Chestnut claims to train for three months leading up to the competition, including weekly practice runs, a carefully controlled diet, and yoga and breathing exercises to help with mental focus.
In commerce, being thin is generally seen as an advantage because a thick layer of fat around the middle can contract the stomach.
The theoretical maximum 84 comes from fitting a curve to the data and also from taking into account the possibility of outliers whose performance is within a certain margin of error of the curve.
The prediction should be true, Smoliga said, unless a “new type of competitor” appears: someone with gigantism or a metabolic condition that puts them outside the normal parameters of human biology.
The limiting factor is likely to be chewing and swallowing rather than gastric capacity, based on the observation that at the end of the 10 minutes, many competitors are still trying to gobble up more sausages and buns.
According to research, published in the Royal Society’s journal Biology Letters, the achievements of human speed eaters are impressive even compared to other species. “Humans can eat faster than bears or coyotes,” said Smoliga. However, wolves, devouring prey with incredible speed, could outpace even elite human eaters.
