This is Nela Zisser…
She ate a 10,000 calorie english breakfast in 42 minutes!
20 eggs, 3 pounds of meat and almost a whole pound of butter.
Ok, I gotta admit, it looks delicious, but still...
Competitive eating has taken off in the US and around the world, and doing it really
comes down to three things: What’s happening biologically, what’s happening mentally,
and how they got like this?!
Let’s start at the beginning, before eating, the stomach muscles relax in a process called
- gastric accommodation.
It’s a way the body anticipates a meal.
Saliva builds up in the mouth and the stomach is bombarded with acid and enzymes that help
in the digestion process.
This happens with everyone, and competitive eaters are no different.
But, it’s about there the similarities between thanksgiving and competition end.
When you eat, your body has systems to tell you when it’s full.
Competitive Eaters -- like distance runners -- have trained themselves to push through
these kinds of natural barriers.
So the eater shoves the first pie, hot dog, or taco into their mouth and it travels down
the esophagus and enters the stomach.
The stomach recognizes this is food, and starts to stretch to accommodate.
A regular human stomach starts out about the size of a clenched fist, and can expand five-fold,
but a competitive eater’s stomach can stretch quite a bit more.
A study from 2007 published scans of a competitive eaters stomach before, during and after he
ate 36 hot dogs.
Look at this!
THIS IS A HUMAN.
Before, shoving these tube-steaks into his body -- the stomach looks pretty wrinkly,
kinda like an uninflated balloon.
Then, after the bushel of brats it looks like this.
Look at that!
THIS IS HORRIFYING.
The researchers found this eater’s stomach could accept a quote “almost unlimited volume
of food”.
It’s hard to know exactly how much competitive eaters’ stomachs could expand… because
studies are thin on the ground, but here’s what we think is happening.
Eaters eat.
A lot.
Chronic overeating stretches the stomach, making it easier to consume massive amounts
of food during competition.
But there’s more to it than that…
The Enteric Nervous System is like a mini-brain specifically for your gut.
It is made up of more than 100 million nerve cells that line the walls of our digestive
tract and it’s there to keep food moving and communicate problems -- like a crammed
tummy, perhaps?
Some people’s Enteric Nervous Systems may just be less sensitive than others, allowing
them to chow down on crazy amounts of food.
Maybe Competitive Eaters have that advantage?
Scientists have found links between the brain and the gut too.
The bacteria living down there share a two-way channel with the brain -- stress and depression
can suppress gut function but perhaps there’s a way to consciously tap into that to eat
more food?
More research is needed.
Competitive eaters say the key to speed eating is the ability to zone out and ignore the
feeling that they’re full.
So that’s it, stretch your stomach, overcome the feeling of being full and just… really
like hot dogs.
But then what?
Let’s say you ate 70 hot dogs, which is like, 15 pounds (7kg) and over 19,000 calories.
Then what?
You know what I mean?
Once eating competitions are over, no one realllly knows what happens because competitors
aren’t gabbing to reporters about their bodily functions, but I bet you it’s not
great.
And if that’s not enough, there are absolutely some serious downsides to eating like this.
Researchers have called competitive eating “potentially self-destructive.”
It can cause things like water intoxication, obesity, But also the need for a gastrectomy
(which means removing part of the stomach!) and gastroparesis, which is when a stomach
so stretched it becomes unable to digest food.
In fact, depending on what kind of foods are being consumed, this behavior can increase
the risk of heart attack or kidney damage!
But aside from that, eaters also risk choking during these challenges.
While professional contests have medics standing by, amateur contests often don’t.
People die at these things.
Seriously.
So FYI.
I love hot dogs too, but don’t try this at home, people.
Just don’t!
I’m hungry.
Maybe you are a competitive eater.
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But you know, maybe you shouldn’t love hot dogs.
Do you know what’s in them?
Find out here.
What’s the biggest meal you’ve ever eaten?
Let us know in the comments down below, subscribe if you haven’t already, and thanks for watching Seeker.
Biggest meal I ever ate was a double whopper with cheese, two
sets of fries, three Dr. Peppers, and three Hershey's sundae pies.