Latest news with #hotdogeating
Daily Mail
06-07-2025
- Health
- Daily Mail
Revolting tactics used to win hot dog eating contest Nathan's is revealed after this year's championship in NYC
Hot dog eating contests may look like a gross display of ravenous gluttony, but there's actually a science to the consuming of dozens of wieners in a matter of minutes. Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest, held at its restaurant on NYC 's Coney Island boardwalk, is the Super Bowl of competitive eaters, and returning champ Joey Chestnut holds the world record for eating 76 frankfurters in buns in just ten minutes in 2021. While many people might think that makes champions like Chestnut and other contestants fast chewers, studies and pro eaters have revealed that downing that number of hot dogs has little to do with actually chomping the food fast - it's all about learning how to swallow properly while chewing less. Moreover, competitive eaters actually train their stomachs to hold that much food at one time without setting off the body's nausea reflex, to allow the eater's stomach to expand by ten to 15 times and hold more than four liters of food (over 50 hot dogs). As for how the famous competitive eater does it, Chestnut focuses on a unique training program of swallowing air, burping, and lubricating his throat. Chestnut told the New York Post: 'I do burping exercises where I swallow air and burp it up just to get those muscles used to being stretched.' 'Usually I'm in bed before 9pm, wake up about 5am, and start doing stretches and yoga and burping exercises to get my stomach loose and stretched after sleeping.' Along with stretching out his stomach and throat muscles, Chestnut revealed he also drinks plenty of aloe vera juice to make sure all the hot dogs slide down safely as he rapidly swallows them. Meanwhile, consuming drinks like milk and water, and low-calorie foods such as vegetables help the wiener eaters to stretch out their stomachs while preparing for these major eating events. Chestnut said: 'I do drink milk like a big baby. I'm a believer that if your body can digest milk, it's great for you. Every now and then I'll drink half a gallon of milk in the morning with some water. That's a nice healthy stretch.' However, once the contest begins, the focus shifts from the size of the contestant's stomach to their ability to get food down their throat fast. Last year, Chestnut told Food & Wine: 'Swallowing is one of the most important things in competitive eating.' Elite eaters try to reduce chewing to the bare minimum needed to break food into manageable masses for swallowing. Their goal is to shift the workload from the jaw and teeth to the throat and esophagus so they can start chewing up another hot dog - like a human conveyor belt. As plenty of viewers of Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest have seen, the competitors also famously dunk their dogs in water. Although that makes them pretty disgusting to eat, dunking the buns softens them up to reduce the need for chewing and allows it to slide down the throat easier. While professional eaters may swear by their secrets to success, studies have found that there are plenty dangers that go along with these eating techniques. A 2007 study by Dr David Metz at the University of Pennsylvania found that rapid eating can lead to temporary gastroparesis, a condition where the stomach struggles to contract and pass food. This can lead to bouts of nausea or vomiting. The researchers also found prolonged stomach stretching may lead to long-term issues like obesity or permanent damage if not managed carefully. The high sodium content in each hot dog can cause temporary water retention and dehydration if the competitors don't hydrate properly before and during the contest. That's why you'll always see plenty of cups of water on the contest tables. It's best to avoid sugary beverages such as soda and sports drinks, too, because they can spike blood sugar levels and lead to an energy crash while eating. Perhaps most obviously, there's also the risk of choking, especially since the competitors are unable to breathe through their mouths while shoving all that food in. Last year, Chestnut said: 'I have to sneak in breaths through my nose. So I exhale and I swallow, swallow, swallow, then I inhale and I swallow, swallow swallow. It's this block breathing and I keep a rhythm.' As for how many hot dogs the human body can possibly eat, a 2020 study published in Biology Letters revealed that 83 hot dogs is likely the limit, just seven more than the current record. The research analyzed 39 years of Nathan's Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest data to estimate the theoretical maximum active consumption rate for humans, finding it's about 832g per minute, or about 83 hot dogs and buns in ten minutes. According to a survey of over 2,000 Americans, commissioned by CanadaCasino, Montana is the country's hot dog-eating capital, with the average resident eating 17 every month, around 204 every year - nearly three times the national average. Wyoming came in second, with locals eating 13 every month, followed by Delaware, where the average resident eats 11 a month. Overall, the survey found the average American eats seven hot dogs every month - about the same number champion Chestnut shovels down in one minute!
Malay Mail
05-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Malay Mail
Ravenous return: Fast-chewing Chestnut wins July 4th hot dog contest
NEW YORK, July 5 — Competitive eater Joey Chestnut recaptured his title at the Nathan's Famous hot dog eating contest yesterday in Brooklyn, downing 70.5 hot dogs and buns in 10 minutes in the July 4th holiday classic. The 41-year-old American missed last year's event after signing a deal with Impossible Foods, whose plant-based products include hot dogs, but he was allowed to enter this year and made his Coney Island comeback a triumphant one. Chestnut won by 24 hot dogs over last year's winner, Patrick Bertoletti of Chicago, but the maestro of mastication could not break his own record of 76 hot dogs that he consumed in 2021. It marked the 17th time Chestnut claimed the 'Mustard Belt' symbolic of supremacy in the gastronomic showdown and his ninth triumph in 10 years. 'Oh my gosh, I was nervous,' Chestnut told event telecaster ESPN after his victory. 'First couple of hot dogs, I was fumbling a little bit, but I found a pretty good rhythm.' Chestnut said that despite his blowout triumph, he was hoping to make a better show of challenging his record consumption total. 'My goal was 70 to 77,' he said. 'I really wanted a little bit more. There's next year and I'm just happy I'm here.' On the women's side, American Miki Sudo won by eating 33 hot dogs and buns in 10 minutes, her 11th victory in the past 12 years, with American Michelle Lesco second on 22.75 dogs and buns. Sudo, who set the women's record of 51 last year, did not compete in 2021 while pregnant, with Lesco winning that year. — AFP
Fox News
05-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Fox News
Joey Chestnut Reclaims his Title
Joey Chestnut returned to the Nathan's Famous Hot Dog Eating Competition reclaiming his title with his 17th victory. #JoeyChestnut Learn more about your ad choices. Visit FOX News Radio
The Guardian
05-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Listen to Joey, sport is always trying to tell you something, even by the medium of hot dogs
The Big Dog is back. And the Big Dog is hungry. Hungry, above all, for dogs. Joey Chestnut has fulfilled his sporting destiny by reclaiming his world champion crown at the legendary 4 July hotdog eating contest in Coney Island, New York. Chestnut, AKA The Silent Warrior, is basically the Messi of elite eating. Or rather he's the Ronaldo, relentless in his perfectionism, possessed of an alluring competitive arrogance, and with the GOAT-level numbers to back it up: winner of the Mustard Belt now 17 times and the world record-holder as of 2021, when he ate 76 hotdogs in 10 minutes, a huge uplift on his debut in 2005 when he ate a frankly pathetic 32 hotdogs. Above all, Chestnut had a point to prove. He was banned from competing last year over a controversial sponsor deal with a plant-based hotdog alternative. Losing the title was a kind of Icarus moment. No one is bigger than the sport. Eating had to rein him in. And so this time around it wasn't about the $100,000 (£73,000) prize. It was about legacy. 'I'm back doing what I love,' Chestnut told the cameras ahead of Thursday's weigh-in. Which is, it seems, cramming an unbelievable amount of hotdogs into his face, and doing so in a contest that, frankly, feels like one of the few things that actually makes any sense this week, perhaps even the greatest and most fundamentally honest of all current human activities. Mainly, this is about will and about passion. 'I want to push myself,' Chestnut told USA Today, going on to talk about marginal gains and the tiny details of preparation, about taking up yoga, about working on rhythm, on ever-smoother delivery. There is talk of applying an 'electric simulation machine' to his abdomen 'to get everything loose', of endless tinkering with the temperature of the water used to dampen the buns, of burping exercises to develop the internal muscles, asthma drugs to improve air flow, open the sinuses and increase his capacity for stuffing hotdogs into his face. Plus of course the daily hard yards of the eating athlete. Chestnut performs endless neck hoists with a 7kg weight attached to a mouthguard. 'When I'm raising up, I'm almost imagining I'm swallowing, so I'm thrusting my tongue against the leather strap the mouthpiece is glued to.'' You've got to admit. This is incredibly sexy. The real kicker, as ever in elite sport, is attitude. Joey Chestnut? Joey Chestnut brought aggression to eating. He is looking for 'a perfect mix of anger and calm'. This is all very real. Three years ago he was forced to employ a chokehold on a stage invader who had run on in a Darth Vader mask to protest against killing animals just so people can stuff them in their mouths. Chestnut didn't stop. He still won by 15 dogs. This is eating heritage. And yes it is also highly confusing. Is this whole thing ironic? Is the world hotdog eating championship a joke? Nobody seems to really know. The stage announcer certainly seems to think it is a comedic event. The crowd has a kind of loose, spring break frat boy vibe. But there are rivalries here, men's and women's events, a massed judging corpus, stats and fandom, and of course that cash prize. It feels real, or like a thing that has become so unexpectedly. This is also not about mocking America: Brit-snobbery, the oh dear what have they done now Jeeves dynamic. I love America, love it as an idea and also as a place, as energy and colour and (even now) optimism. I also love hotdogs and can cram in up to one of them at a single sitting. But at the same time, it is also impossible to overstate how disgusting the hotdog eating championship is as a spectacle, and in every sense of the word. You probably think you already know it's disgusting. Well, you don't know nothing Mr Garrison, because you've never been confronted by an endlessly replicating pork-beef dog coated in your own semi-vomit. The world hotdog eating championship looks, and there is no other way of putting this, like a self-loathing high-speed fellatio marathon, the competitors constantly nodding their heads, thrusting in food with both hands, finishing up coated in bun paste and meat-goop, looking stricken but also impossibly excited. All of this is spectated by a mob crushed up into the notorious Splash Zone, with its crouching judges, its stern warnings about 'flying debris'. To be fair, you can really see the neck exercises pay off at this point. The natural assumption is the eating athletes will be large. They're not. They're buff, trim, competition-ready. Joey Chestnut's head is perfectly rounded with muscle, like a boxer's biceps or a gymnast's core. If I were to nitpick I would suggest making the sport more robust with a rule that all dogs and buns must be consumed as a whole, not tearing it apart and going dog then bun, which is essentially ball-tampering. Otherwise, it is a compelling spectacle, and in its own way very honest too. All American sports are basically an excuse to eat things, a complex machinery entwined around the founding desire to have a hotdog. The hotdog championship cuts to the chase, like reducing football to a one-kick penalty shootout. Here is the thing you actually want. Just have it. It is the perfect sport in structural ways, too. All sports are supposed to reflect a culture, to express some part of the character of a nation, even in bastardised form, like bullfighting in Spain, or the way cricket dramatises the English class system. And yes it would be easy at this point to mock America's dysfunction around food, but this also is a relationship with roots in something real and beautiful: abundance, prosperity, fecundity of the land, tired hungry masses settling a new frontier. Eating was stitched into the American century. JK Galbraith's famous 1957 study, The Affluent Society, concluded 'capitalism works', as proved beyond doubt by excess consumption. 'More die in the United States of too much food than of too little,' he concluded, back when this was a good thing. So food is freedom in America. 'Tastes like Freedom' is a common banner at the hotdog championships, even if that taste turns out to be a bolus of compacted sawdust-sausage the size of a moped. And even if like so many of the freedom things – cars, sex, guns – this is a freedom that has bolted terminally out of hand. Daily life in America can feel like being chased by food, constantly craving the perfect salty sweet hit that is America's gift, burdened by the patriotic duty to consume. Restaurants that look like car showrooms. The idea that a salad is in fact some kind of toxic assault by steroid-fed flaps of ungodly meat. The fact even in high-end places the business is still fetishising food: the greatest burrito in the world, the most organic vegan dim sum ever devised. America and food is so obviously dysfunctional you start to feel you could fix the whole place if you went at it symptoms-first. Don't stop eating. Just stop eating that. And yes, this is all doubly, trebly, hyper-disgusting when America is also in effect sponsoring a famine in Gaza, and all the while staging a hotdog competition where Joey Chestnut can win $100,000. But there is domestic sadness to this, too. The hotdog is one of those American objects, icons of the everyday, things that feel even now like a shot at happiness fallen wide. The hotdog origins story is suitably diffuse, credited to a sausage vender at the 1906 St Louis World Fair, or to a moment of founding genius in Louisiana in 1904, or to Germans everywhere who were already putting 'dachshunds' in buns. It doesn't matter. There should be a vague and folksy feel to this. The hotdog is immigrant food, sports field food, egalitarian food. This is American symbolism, American art. It's Gatsby's green beacon, Jack Kerouac burning like a roman candle, Ignatius Riley pushing his hotdog trolley around New Orleans and muttering about the wheel of fate. And now the hotdog has been updated, via the Joey Chestnut show, into a klaxon of decay and excess. Basically, everything is a hotdog eating contest now, from sport to business, to the shared human experience, all of us in the wealthy world assailed by this agony of consumption, wants, desires. In the same week of the world hotdog eating championship the UK government has even started pushing weight loss drugs as a healthy living choice. We will create a world full of calories, we will take away your green space, stick you in front of a screen, make your life a matter of passive consumption. Then when it gets too expensive to fix your mind and body, well, we have an injection for that. Shoot this thing full of painkillers, antidepressants and weight loss jabs, we might just about muster up a functional human. So Joey Chestnut and his hotdog performance speaks in a way that is oddly heartening, an act of punkish satire. This is the life you have made for us, Joey Chestnut is saying, human need extrapolated to a wild extreme. I will take this world and hold up a mirror, turn it into a spectacle that mocks the spectacle. Enter the splash zone, Big Food. Feel his spittle on your face. It does always feel like sport is trying to tell you something, even here, via the medium of hotdogs. Sometimes well, sometimes you just get the heroes you need.
The Guardian
05-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Hot diggity dog: Joey Chestnut regains title in New York hotdog eating contest
Joey 'Jaws' Chestnut reclaimed his title at the annual Nathan's Fourth of July hotdog eating contest on Friday, cementing his status as the undisputed all-time champion of hotdog consumption. A rerun of Jaws was the blockbuster attraction in Coney Island this Fourth of July holiday, but not the classic Steven Spielberg movie enjoying a new lease of life on the 50th anniversary of its release. The jaws here belong to Chestnut, a leviathan in the world of competitive eating that has grown as a sporting spectacle to the point where it is a regular fixture on ESPN. Chestnut, 41, consumed 70 1/2 hotdogs and buns in 10 minutes, falling short of his record of 76 wieners and buns set in 2021. It marked the 17th win in 20 appearances for Chestnut at the internationally televised competition. In the women's division, defending champion Miki Sudo of Tampa, Florida, won her 11th title, downing 33 dogs, besting a dozen competitors. Last year, she ate a record 51 links. Enthusiasts of the annual Nathan's Fourth of July hotdog eating contest will recall that Chestnut, whose nickname is Jaws, was controversially booted from the 2024 iteration of the event he had dominated for the best part of two decades for signing a deal to promote a rival brand of plant-based wieners. It was, as the event's impresario, George Shea, declared at the time with trademark grandeur, the equivalent of Michael Jordan telling Nike – purveyors of his lucrative Air Jordan line of sneakers – that he wanted to rep for Adidas too. This year, to the relief of many, Jaws returned to the fold after serving a year's suspension. On Friday, the world record holder, with 83 dogs and buns scoffed in a single 10-minute period in an unrelated Netflix special in September 2024, was the star attraction once again in pursuit of his 17th Mustard Belt. 'I'm thrilled to be returning,' Chestnut, 41, said in a post on X before the competition. 'This event means the world to me. It's a cherished tradition, a celebration of American culture, and a huge part of my life.' Referring to the controversy that caused his exclusion, he was circumspect. 'While I have and continue to partner with a variety of companies, including some in the plant-based space, those relationships were never a conflict with my love for hotdogs. To be clear: Nathan's is the only hotdog company I've ever worked with,' he wrote. The straw-hatted Shea, mastermind of an event that draws tens of thousands to New York every year, and a television audience estimated to have grown to 2 million since the first contest in 1972, welcomed the return of the king. 'Last year we got as big a crowd as ever, more media than ever, and we had a fantastic contest that was actually more competitive because Joey has been so dominant,' he told the Guardian. 'That said, there's definitely more excitement now he's back. We and everybody, fans included, are very excited and looking forward to the Fourth, and his entrance into the arena will be triumphant and explosive.' Shea, whose colourful and bombastic introductions of the competitors are as much a part of the spectacle as the mouth-stuffing element that follows, said he had been working for weeks on how he will proclaim Chestnut's homecoming. 'It's not his nickname that makes him who he is, it's his performance that has defined him, and I believe that's been very significantly elevated by the introductions that I do of him as a larger-than-life figure,' said Shea, a New York-based public relations executive who says working the Fourth of July event is his 'annual treat to myself'. 'I try to create a mix that includes straight and grand introductions that describe what these people are doing on the eating circuit, with a mix of funny, absurd and poetic, and then epic when you get to Joey.' Shea admitted it would be hard to top his 2015 introduction, a fire and brimstone speech that somewhat melodramatically hailed Chestnut as an almost otherworldly being: 'A comet blazes to herald his arrival, and his victory shall be transcribed into every language known to history, including Klingon,' he pronounced. 'The bratwurst, and pierogi, and Hooters chicken wing eating champion of the world, eight-time Nathan's Famous hotdog eating champion of the world, the No 1 eater in the world, I give you America itself, Joey Chestnut.' The expectation for Friday, at least in betting circles, was that Chestnut would come storming back to recapture his crown from last year's winner, Patrick 'Deep Dish' Bertoletti, and a strong field of Major League Eating characters, perhaps even by topping his own event record, set in 2021, of 76 hotdogs. But the real winner, Shea said, was the sport of competitive eating itself. 'We've been talking, there was a lot of back-and-forth, and people had different perspectives, different opinions, different everything, but everybody wanted this to happen. We stayed at it, and we finally came together,' he said. 'What happened was unfortunate, it was disappointing not to have Joey there, but in the big picture it further elevated the contest, and you know, we're very conscious of that all the time.'
