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Sunday, July 06, 2008
After watching an event like the Nathan’s Famous hot dog eating contest or the gluttony contests in Japan, most viewers are sure to wonder what makes it possible to eat that much food without literally losing it, and maybe whether their bodies could be pushed to such extremes as well.
Competitive eaters aren’t built like you and me
A study from the Journal of Roentgenology (that’s the study of radiation, in case you were wondering) discovered that people who eat competitively and people who are just big eaters don’t deal with food the same way.
An unnamed competitive eater and a man who liked to eat a lot were both studied with real-time X-rays while they ate hot dogs.
The regular guy, who was six foot two and weighed 210 pounds, ate seven hot dogs with no buns before feeling full. The X-ray showed that his stomach was full of hot dogs and that there was no real stomach stretching.
On the other hand, the competitive eater, who was five foot 10 and 165 pounds, chowed down 36 hot dogs in 10 minutes and said he wasn’t full when the researchers told him to stop. His stomach swelled to hold the massive contents, making him look more like a pregnant woman than an otherwise slim man.
Training for eating
The competitive eater said he had trained himself to be able to eat mass quantities of food, and now he no longer feels hunger.
This same stretching of the stomach was seen in a Japanese investigation into the stomach of competitive eater Tomoko “The Aesthetician” Miyake.
Pictured is a normal woman’s stomach on the left after eating as much as she could eat and Miyake’s stomach on the right after consuming a 5,000-calorie meal of pork and curry. So perhaps oogui champs around the world have learned this same mechanism for stretching their stomachs.
Or it could be there’s something else special about them that makes it possible for them to eat so much. For instance in Japanese oogui champ Natsuko “Gal” Sone’s new book, a doctor suggests the ability to eat tons of food without getting sick or gaining weight may be caused by an abnormal abundance of bifidobacteria in the gut or just an amazing ability to metabolize fat.
Whatever the reason these superhuman eaters can do what they do, it’s still pretty disturbing to watch, and potentially harmful as well. Doctors say it’s possible the stretched-out stomach one day won’t stretch back, leading to permanent nausea and vomiting that would require surgery to fix. So don’t try this at home.
(By Sarah E. White for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)
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