Another Fourth of July meant another round of Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest — but few people know the physical toll it takes on competitors’ bodies.
Patrick Bertoletti won the title Thursday after consuming 58 hot dogs and buns in 10 minutes at the event on Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York.
That’s the equivalent of more than 15,000 calories and quadruple the entire daily salt and fat recommendation for an adult in one sitting.
In the women’s category, Miki Sudo won her 10th title, downing 51 hot dogs and bun and setting a new world women’s record.
Studies suggest wolfing down dozens of hot dogs in one go stretches the stomach by up to quadruple its normal size, turning it into ‘a massively distended food-filled sac occupying most of the upper abdomen’.
Patrick Bertoletti won the title Thursday after consuming 58 hot dogs and buns in 10 minutes at the event on Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York
In the women’s category, Miki Sudo won her 10th title, downing 51 hot dogs and buns
Experts warn that over time, this could eventually cause the body to stop emptying solid food, leaving competitive eaters with intractable nausea and vomiting.
The true health effects of competitive eating are not well known – because its such a new phenomenon and studying it in the general public would be deemed unethical.
Competitive eaters also spend months stretching their stomachs using ‘dangerous’ techniques like ‘water loading’, or downing gallons of milk and eating mountains of cabbage and fibrous foods.
According to the nutritional information on Nathan’s website, one of its Original Coney Island natural casing beef hot dogs contains 170 calories, 16 grams of fat (including 6 grams of saturated fat), and 480 milligrams of sodium.
This means the male winner, Bertoletti, consumed 9,860 calories in 10 minutes, not including the bun.
Each of the buns has 130 calories, pushing the amount to 17,400, which is double the amount of calories the CDC recommends an adult male consumes each week.
High sodium intake is enough to send blood pressure soaring, which can trigger a heart attack or stroke. The recommended sodium level is no more than 2,300 milligrams each day, just shy of five hot dogs.
And the high fat can lead to nausea, diarrhea and gastrointestinal distress, Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics spokesperson Debbie Petitpain told CBS News.
However, experts said as long as these competitors return to regular eating, their bodies should also return to normal.
Legendary hotdog eater Joey ‘Jaws’ Chestnut, who won the competition 16 times, said he trains for every Nathan’s contest for three months straight by performing mouth exercises to strengthen his mouth and throat.
‘Every practice, I record it and I try to push a little bit harder and figure out what I can do differently,’ Chestnut said in 2021.
WHO LET THE DOGS OUT: People wore hot dog costumes at a parking lot in Coney Island, NYC
‘You can only practice so much. If I practice too much I start gaining weight, and if I start gaining weight then I start slowing down. So it’s a weird double-edged sword. You have to love to eat, 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 just 14 wieners.
While it is unclear why the amount eaten has changed over the decades, it was likely due to people training for months to expand their stomachs.
A 2007 study conducted by the University of Pennsylvania analyzed a 29-year-old man who ranked among the top 10 worldwide in competitive eating.
The man was asked to ingest an effervescent agent and high-density barium before eating hot dogs for 12 minutes, which allowed researchers to see the food move through his body.
Another group of regular eaters consumed seven franks before reporting symptoms of sickness.
Following the study, the competitive eater’s stomach showed it could expand as he consumed the food.
‘The key to success in competitive speed eating is the ability to slowly train and adapt the stomach so that it can expand and dilate to a remarkable degree, enabling the speed eater to consume an extraordinary volume of food in an extremely short time (possibly superimposed on an innately compliant stomach),’ according to the published paper.
The team compared a competitive eater to ‘a predatory carnivore that periodically gorges itself on its kills, ingesting massive amounts of food for sustenance until it captures another prey days or even weeks later.’
However, these eaters may also lose the sensation of fullness and satisfaction when eating 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 dilated, flaccid stomach may eventually decompensate, becoming an enormous sac incapable of shrinking to its original size and emptying solid food.
