‘People can perforate their stomachs’

By Nick Youssef

It’s 4th of July weekend which means, friends, fireworks, the walking back of freedoms by the Supreme Court and forcing 78 hot dogs down your throat to be crowned King of Coney Island! Entering its 107th year, Nathan’s Famous International Hot Dog Eating Contest gathers competitive eaters from around the world to see who can push their health insurance coverage to its limits.

Speaking of health, Brooklyn Magazine interviewed Dr. Adam Goodman, section chief of gastroenterology and hepatology at NYU Langone Hospital-Brooklyn in Sunset Park, to find out just how unhealthy it is to be an American — er uh, a competitive eater.

Dr. Goodman (courtesy NYU Langone Hospital-Brooklyn)

Dr. Goodman, let’s say a patient came to you and said they wanted to enter Nathan’s Hot Dog contest. Would you recommend that they, or really anybody, do this?
No. [Laughs.] Absolutely not.

That’s pretty definitive.
Competitively, no. If you’re gonna go and try to eat a couple of hot dogs. Okay.

So what is a healthy amount if you were doing a backyard challenge?
Probably different for every person, but, you know, healthy? Probably one or two. What would somebody be able to eat? Probably close to six or seven before they started to feel a little nauseous and sick and like they had to stop.

How would someone prepare for this contest? Is there a “healthy” way to prepare for something that’s incredibly unhealthy to do?
Yeah, I mean, so you’re getting into binge eating and that is incredibly unhealthy. Professional competitive eaters train their stomachs to relax and their are esophagus to relax. They’re able to allow the stomach to expand to levels that normal people can’t. They train by drinking water, low calorie, high amount of things like gallons of water and things like that to try to stretch stomach in a short period of time. So those kinds of things I would not recommend for the general person just like, “Oh, I’m gonna enter the eating contest.” [Laughs.]

So I guess that answers how a lot of these people stay so thin. Is it because the preparation involves a lot of water and just low calorie stomach stretching?
No one knows completely whether people who are competitive eaters actually are born with some sort of stretchability to their stomach or they learn how to do it and then they can train themselves. It’s probably a combination of both. There may be like some sort of, ability for them to inherently just have their stomachs accommodate more food and then over time they do exercises and things like drinking water or eating certain foods very quickly to allow their stomach to increase its capacity.

Has anyone studied competitive eaters like Joey Chestnut or done long-term studies that show how they’re able to do this and not die?
Nothing long term. There was a study the American Journal of Roentgenology, an X-ray study essentially, where they had a competitive eater and a lay person eat hot dogs quickly over like a 10 minute period of time. And at least in the short term what they saw was that the normal person’s stomach hardly stretched at all and could only eat about seven hotdogs or so and then felt sick and had to stop, whereas the competitive eater sort of just kept expanding while they were eating. That’s the only study that I looked up and there was no long-term follow up.

Has there been anything really extreme like an exploding stomach?
People can perforate their stomachs. There are definitely binge eaters who have eaten so much that their stomachs perforated or exploded and they’ve had surgery to repair that.

Does skipping breakfast and lunch before a contest or just a 4th of July barbecue you’re excited for actually help fill your stomach or is it just as good to sort of have a light breakfast?
That’s an interesting question. I don’t think it matters whether you skip or not. Because if you eat, you know, everything comes out of the stomach usually in about eight hours.

For a competitive eater, would a light breakfast be 15 eggs and a gallon of oatmeal?
I’m not sure from what I’ve read, you know, competitive eaters, their stomachs just continually stretch and they never feel full. So I don’t know, most competitive eaters are thin, in good shape for the most part. From what I’ve read they do this in contests, but they don’t do this on an everyday basis.

So there’s an off season.
Kind of, if you think of it like that.

What is your thought on this stat: health researchers at the University of Michigan found that eating a single hot dog could take 36 minutes off your life.
Interesting. Did they say what kind of hotdog? Was it all natural or was it the usual hotdog with nitrates and all the other things inside?

They were looking at processed meats and the hotdog meat is that much worse due to sodium and trans fatty acids plus the bread. So all of it together.
Okay. I would say if the research was done, it’s probably true.

What is your go-to hotdog order?
Natural, organic, nitrate free.

Any toppings?
Definitely mustard and sauerkraut.

I imagine the sauerkraut is good for your digestion, right?
It is. Sauerkraut is good for your digestive tract.

This is what I’m gonna have from now on. I’ll say it’s on doctor’s orders.
If you’re gonna do it, might as well be nitrate free.