Has Joey Chestnut even hit his hot dog eating prime?
On Sunday Joey Chestnut will be looking for his 14th Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Championship. After he won last year’s edition of the event, the New York Times spoke with Dr. David Metz who is a professor of medicine at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Metz performed a study that compared the digestive tracts of a competitive eater and a normal eater. The Times summarized Metz’s study as follows:
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…
The extent to which these traits are innate or can be improved with training is not entirely clear, but a majority of elite competitive eaters who have competed in the Nathan’s contest have improved over time. ‘Nobody gets worse,’ Dr. Metz said.
Since overcoming rival Takeru Kobayashi in 2007, Chestnut has won 13 of the last 14 annual competitions, and his hot dog per minute rate has increased over time.
As Chestnut has improved, he has separated himself from the field. His victory over Kobayashi in 2007 was by only three hot dogs, while last year he outpaced second-place finisher Darron Breeden 33 hot dogs.
Obviously Chestnut is a gifted competitor, but it is also possible that his time spent competitively eating has given him a physical advantage over his opponents. If his stomach has a capacity for stretching that gives him an edge, it will be all the tougher for his opposition to compete.
Chestnut will be the clear favorite again on Sunday, but per a study published by Dr. James Smoliga, there is still room for his record to grow. By using nonlinear modeling and generalized extreme value analysis, Smoliga projects that a human is capable of 83 hot dogs in the 10-minute time frame.
While that number does seem extreme, it is only an 0.8 hot dog per minute rate increase over Chestnut’s winning performance from 2020. Perhaps another year of conditioning his stomach has put him in position to maximize the human ability to eat Coney Island’s most famous export.