In the world of competitive eating, there’s one event that stands above all the rest. By which I mean, there’s one event that holds some degree of mainstream respect, instead of solely being a source of 2 a.m. YouTube disgust. That event, of course, is Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest, which is held every year on Fourth of July.
It all makes for a pretty perfect American tradition, being that it’s something that would normally get you sent to a mental and/or regular hospital, but because it’s in the name of patriotism, it creates cult heroes instead.
That said, it’s not all glitz and glamour. In fact, it’s zero percent glitz or glamour.
Here are five particularly stomach-turning facts about it for your displeasure…
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Disgusting Preparation Methods Made It What It Is Today
If you ask the world’s weirdest historians about when the Nathan’s contest became a bona-fide freak show, they’ll point to the debut of Takeru Kobayashi. He entered the fray in 2001, and immediately skyrocketed the frankfurter count to a staggering 50 hot dogs. With that one event, we moved forever past the point of “real hungry” into “genuinely concerning.”
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According to Kobayashi himself, the key to doubling the previous record was his training, which involved force-feeding himself three gallons of water in 90 seconds to expand his stomach. From there, two paths diverged: One saying, “Yeah, don’t do that please,” and another that said, “Let’s see how nightmarish this gets.”
Competitive Eating Comes With A Whole Lot of, Let’s Say, Reverse-Eating
Everyone’s probably familiar with the body’s go-to response to too much food — which is to fire some back out with a rousing “no thank you.” As you’d imagine, the point at which your stomach has no more need for hot dogs is far before you’re even in the lower double digits, so if you’re a competitive eater, you’re also, by the nature of the beast, a competitive vomiter.
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A former Nathan’s champion named Tim Janus shared that over 12 years of competitive eating, he tossed his cookies/hot dogs/et cetera close to 10,000 times. Meanwhile, I’m going straight to the hospital if I hit a baker’s dozen upchucks within just one year.
Besides being deeply gross, that propensity for stomach emptying doesn’t help your professional eating pursuits either. So what’s someone to do but to reprogram one of the most important organs in the body to stop doing its job?
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The way that your stomach processes food is known as peristalsis, and this is a valuable process — if you’re actually trying to absorb nutrients and feed yourself, that is. If you’re instead trying to make your stomach explode like an overfull catheter, it’s an annoyance. To that end, competitive eaters have actually achieved turning off peristalsis altogether.
If you’re thinking, hey, teaching your stomach to stop stomach-ing seems bad, you’re absolutely right! It ties into a serious danger that high-level competitive eaters have to contend with. Namely, something called profound gastroparesis. Here, “profound” doesn’t mean thoughtful and incisive, but rather, “This is so messed-up we didn’t ever really think it would happen.”
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What it entails is that your stomach muscles, weakened by your hobby of filling yourself like a meat scarecrow, no longer move food through your digestive tract properly, even when you’re not trying to set a record. Because sometimes, predicting health risks is a real Occam’s razor situation.
Speaking of shutting down natural body processes, competitive eating can also be responsible for, by far, the least sexy reason to eliminate your gag reflex.
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The fact is, at the speed and volumes modern eating competitions are approaching, it’s generous to even describe what they’re doing as “eating.” There’s very little chewing and possibly less digesting going on. It’s closer to trying to fit two weeks of luggage into a single TSA-approved carry-on than any sort of impressive stomach function. And so, when you’re trying to shove chunks of almost fully ungnawed foodstuffs down your throat, you learn to turn off your gag reflex entirely.
After doing the research for this post, I wish I could do the same.
Eli Yudin
