What happens to your stomach during a concurrently to eat hot dogs?

Every Fourth of July at the Nathan's Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest, competitive eater champion Joey Chestnut gulps down dozens of hot dogs and returns year after year to do it again. However, the long-term effects on his body and the bodies of other competitive eaters are unknown.

In 2021, Chestnut set a world record by downing 76 hot dogs and buns in ten minutes, and in 2022, he downed 63 to win again.

Debbie Petitpain, a spokesperson for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, stated that because competitive eating is a relatively new sport with a relatively small number of participants, the sport's long-term effects are unknown.

However, medical professionals claim that the practice does raise some potential health issues.

According to Dr. Rajeev Jain of Texas Digestive Disease Consultants, the stomach, which normally contracts when people eat, may become permanently stretched out. Additionally, it could have an effect on gastric emptying, the process by which food moves into the duodenum from the stomach.

"There's no reason to do that type of thing from a medical perspective," Jain stated. "Nobody is going to get funded for a randomized, controlled trial where you say, 'Hey, I'm going to quadruple your stomach size and see what happens to you.'" Still, gastroenterologists know what happens when a trained competitor eats dozens of hot dogs in a short amount of time. Some hints are provided by a 2007 University of Pennsylvania study that was published in the American Journal of Roentgenology.

What happens to competitive eaters' stomachs?

A control group and a fast-food competitor, a 29-year-old man ranked in the top 10 worldwide, were asked to eat as many hot dogs as they could in a 12-minute time frame in the study. The study focused solely on hot dogs, despite the fact that most contests require buns to be included. Before the men ate the hot dogs, the researchers examined their stomachs and asked each man to consume an effervescent agent and high-density barium so they could observe the food's movement through their bodies.

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