So, a Dr. has tried to figure out what the human capacity for hot dog eating is:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/...te=1&user_id=13c02682ba4125a0ef8aac515b657a7e
If you can't read it, here are some highlights:
... For the past few months, Dr. Smoliga, a veterinarian and exercise scientist, had been working on a mathematical analysis of the maximum number of hot dogs that a human could theoretically consume in 10 minutes.
“The answer is 83,” said Dr. Smoliga, a professor at High Point University in North Carolina.
He has now published the full analysis, which calculated this number based on 39 years of historical data from the Nathan’s contest, as well as on mathematical models of human performance that consider the potential for extreme athletic feats.
... The chief factor limiting how much a person (or animal) can eat at once is the stomach’s capacity for stretching to accommodate the volume of food. In 2007, a
study examined the digestive tracts of two men — one a competitive eater, the other a regular volunteer — when they took part in a simulated hot dog eating contest in a lab. The control subject stopped after seven hot dogs, declaring that he would be sick if he ate another bite. The speed-eater scarfed down 36 hot dogs.
The study found that the most striking difference between the two men was that the competitive eater’s stomach had an enormous capacity for stretching, and that the food that was eaten during the test stayed in the stomach, rather than being emptied into the intestines, said the study’s senior author, Dr. David Metz, a professor of medicine at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.
. . . This performance curve implies that the stomach muscles of competitive eaters may lose their ability to contract back to their original size, leaving them “with a big flaccid bag for a stomach,” he said. (That’s not the only safety concern — at least seven people have died from choking during an eating contest.)
. . . Despite using the same hot dogs and buns for 40 years, the Nathan’s contest has seen performance among elite competitors rise by about 700 percent. “No other sport comes close to that when records are measured in a 100-plus year span,” Dr. Smoliga said.
Although the meteoric rise in the hot dog record is remarkable, the pattern it follows is not, Dr. Joyner said. As an event becomes better known, “people start to train for it because there’s some kind of incentive, like fame or money,” he said. The competition pool becomes deeper, and new records are set.
If Dr. Smoliga’s prediction of 83 hot dogs in 10 minutes seems like a stretch, consider this: In Dr. Metz’s 2007 study, the speed eater had downed 36 hot dogs before the researchers terminated the simulated contest, worried that he might perforate his stomach. Thirteen years later, Mr. Chestnut ate more than two times as many hot dogs, which suggests that we probably won’t know the actual human limit until we reach it.
