It turns out that the answer is 84.
This theoretical limit of 84 hot dogs invites many, many questions. What are the limitations? Is this the amount of food that a human stomach can hold, or is it a thing to chew and swallow? If we could unhook our jaw like a python, would that number go up?
James Smoliga, author of the study, has the answers. Smoliga is a professor in the physiotherapy department at High Point University.
As a physiologist studying sports science, you’re interested in performance limits: how fast humans can run, how far they can go, how many tubes of processed meat can force their throats in a given period of time, that kind of thing. .
“The average person would probably encounter a stomach capacity problem,” Smoliga told CNN. “But competitive eaters train specifically to expand their stomachs, so for the best competitive eaters, it’s probably more chewing and feeding within a time frame that limits it.”
Eating as many hot dogs (74 hot dogs, the current record is roughly equivalent to 21,000 calories) “would likely disrupt normal, healthy gastrointestinal function,” according to the study.
“There’s not a lot of research on competitive consumers, but what we do know is that obese people and people with binge eating disorders have similar types of physiology: They may have more food in the stomach, which can alter mental feelings of satiety “
There’s also a problem, he said, getting all that food off the eight-lane, crowded highway of an expanded stomach toward the smallest outlet of the large intestine. When stomachs stretch, either from training or another condition, food can empty more slowly into the intestine. When you’re not used to being so overloaded, well, “gastrointestinal upset” is probably the most polite and least painful way of expressing the result.
Smoliga said he conducted the investigation for various reasons. First, it was asked whether the pattern of physical limitations shown in competitive eating would reflect the patterns in other sports, such as athletics.
“On something like the 100-meter dash, looking at the records and the performances, you will notice that there are small incremental changes in performance,” he said. “But then something big changes: the sport becomes more popular or professionalized, or there is a new medicine or procedure, and the performance limits increase.”
Additionally, Smoliga noted that the rate of active intake (in this case, how many hot dogs can be sucked) is related to the plasticity of the stomach (in this case, how many hot dogs will your stomach accommodate). In the study, she provided some of the first recorded estimates for this consumption rate by calculating the total energy composition of hot dogs and monitoring the body mass of competitors who eat.
The study postulated that “consuming large amounts of food quickly can be ecologically beneficial” in nature because, when combined with slow stomach emptying rates, it could decrease the number of times it takes to hunt or buy food. The plasticity of the human stomach, according to the study results, appears to be similar to that of brown bears, larger than that of coyotes, and smaller than that of gray wolves.
Of course, there are many differences to be aware of. For one thing, bears and gray wolves rarely have the need or opportunity to sit at a table and eat unlimited amounts of processed food. But, as Smoliga said, “It is still an interesting subject to study.”
And it can take you away from hot dogs forever.
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