JAWS CHESTNUT, BROOKLYN AND HOT DOGS

Okay, so who is Joey "Jaws" Chestnut? None other than the world reigning champion  of the most hot dogs (frankfurters) , buns included, ingested in 10 minutes. 

 This year Joey Chestnut won his sixth straight Mustard Belt, downing 68 hot dogs and buns. Chestnut from San Jose, CA.  has won every contest at Nathan’s since 2007 and in 2009 set the world record with 68 hot dogs.

Any way you look at it, Chestnut ate almost 7 hot dogs per minute and a total of over 18,500 calories consumed in 10 minutes is incredible!

It is an amazing but vomitatiously obscene sight to behold. Human beings stuffing as many hot dogs and buns down their throat within 10 minutes. 

Known as a "sport" called competitive eating in which surprisingly, mostly very thin people are the best at this skill.

It wouldn’t be the Fourth of July without hot dogs,or more specifically, hot dog eating contests. Every year at Nathan’s Famous in Coney Island, competitive eaters race to see who can down the most hot dogs and buns in ten minutes. 

This is  an annual competition held in the Coney Island neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York that attracts 40,000 fans and is broadcast on ESPN to nearly two million viewers nationwide.




He tells the AP that he was trying to break his world record but a bad minute halfway into the competition ruined his shot. “I’m a little bummed out that I didn’t get to 70, Chestnut said".

Nathan’s wasn’t the only place to see hot dog champions stuff sausages down their gullets. At Crif Dog in Bushwick, former world champion Takeru Kobayashi held his own event. Kobayashi, who, like Chestnut, has won six Mustard Belts — was banned from the Nathan’s event in 2010 after a contract dispute with "Major League Eating". 

Yep, "Major League Eating" is the world governing body that oversees all eating competitions.

Sonya Thomas, from Alexandria, VA, also won the woman's contest at Nathan's Famous. Thomas who goes by the nickname "Black Widow," downed 45 dogs to win the women's competition.

Both Chestnut and Thomas take home $10,000 as this year's champions.Second place went to Tim Janus with 52 hot dogs, who takes home $5,000. He was third last year. Juliet Lee came in 2nd in the women's contest, eating 33 in the time allotted. She won $5,000 for her effort.The Nathan's Famous Fourth of July International Hot Dog Eating Contest has been a city tradition for 97 years.

Every year, on the Fourth of July, Americans eat hot dogs. A lot of hot dogs. According to the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council (yes, such a thing exists), 150 million of them, to be exact, enough to stretch from Washington D.C. to Los Angeles over five times.

But this small group of people eat a whole lot more hot dogs than the rest of us on July 4. They are the contestants of Nathan's Famous Fourth of July International Hot Dog Eating Contest,  Competitive eater   Joey Chestnut as I said holds the official world record for eating 68 hot dogs and buns in 10 minutes.  

All of this begs the question, what are the effects on the body of eating so much in so little time. First, a look at the basics: According to nutrition facts listed on the Nathan's website, each hot dog packs 290 calories, 17 grams of fat and 710 milligrams of sodium. That means chowing through 68 hot dogs provides almost enough calories as someone on a 2,000-calorie-a-day diet would need in ten days.  

Very little research exists surrounding the effects of competitive eating on the body, mainly because so few people are compelled to stuff their faces for a living. 

But one study remains the most commonly-cited reference whenever the topic comes up, as it seems to each year when the hot dog eating contest rolls around.  

A team of radiologists and gastroenterologists published the study in 2007 in the American Journal of Roentgenology. They had 29-year-old competitive eater, Tim Janus (as part of a National Geographic special), and a 35-year-old male control eater eat as many hot dogs as they could in 12 minutes, and then performed a series of stomach scans to see how both men handled all those dogs. (Click over to the study to see photos of the scans.)  

The regular eater finished seven hot dogs before he tapped out; the competitive eater ate 36 before the researchers said he could stop, they had seen enough. His abdomen, which had appeared flat before the eating began, now "protruded enough to create the distinct impression of a developing intrauterine pregnancy," the researchers wrote, while the average eater's stomach appeared just as it had before. "Normally, the upper stomach expands to accept the food," Dr. David C. Metz, one of the co-authors of the study, and a professor of medicine in the division of gastroenterology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. "The muscles relax to receive the food and that increases the volume of food you can put into it without increasing pressure." As pressure increases in the average person's stomach, they burp, experience nausea or even vomit. "Our hypothesis became that [competitive eaters] have the ability to relax their stomachs to such a degree that they can just eat and eat until you and I would be ready to pop." 

Metz offers the following analogy: While eating, the average person's stomach may expand to hold two or three liters, he imagines, whereas a competitive eater's may expand to hold six or seven. There hasn't been any research into how competitive eaters come to react this way. Metz believes it's a combination of nature and nurture. 

Many are probably born with an innate ability to relax the stomach so they never seem to reach a point of feeling full, but they also probably train themselves to expand their stomachs even larger, he says. Janus indeed told 

Metz and his colleagues that he didn't feel full during the experiment,or ever. Instead, he avoided gaining weight by measuring portions of food and resisting the temptation to indulge in seconds. While this self-discipline has kept him trim and fit until now, the researchers wrote, "It is easy to envision a scenario in which aging speed eaters lose their willpower and engage in chronic binge eating because they never feel sated."  

But, in fact, the majority of the successful eaters on the professional circuit aren't morbidly obese. The thinking goes that thinner people have the advantage because their stomachs can expand with less fat pushing against the organ, ABC News reported. To stay in competitive shape, though, requires training -- and not just sitting around and eating. "The new generation of eaters is interested in weight lifting, running," Jason Fagone, who followed competitive eaters to write "Horseman of the Esophagus" told CNN. "They have more athletic body types than the old generation." He said competitive eaters liken an annual hot dog eating competition to running a marathon, yes, both are stresses to the body as it is pushed to the extreme, but they are occasional ones. 

Chestnut himself detailed some of what goes into this training to WebMD, saying about once a week he eats a whole bunch of whatever food is up next on his competitive circuit to "slowly make my body adapt to my goal." He'll also drink a gallon of milk in one sitting to train his stomach to expand. "Psychologically, I like to go in hungry," he told the website. "If I see on the scale that I have dropped weight, I can easily imagine an enormous amount of food inside me." That's why he says he sticks to protein supplements in the days before an event. He also goes back to supplements for a day or two after an event or a training session as his stomach empties out.  

And what about for those watching at home? Eating competitions can "send a message to spectators that going hog wild with food is not a big deal," American Dietetic Association spokesman and nutritionist Milton Stokes told Web MD. "It's like magic, a magical American myth," Adrienne Rose Johnson, a doctorate student at Stanford, told GOOD. Johnson wrote a paper called "Magic Metabolisms: Competitive Eating and the Formation of an American Bodily Idea." "I think it speaks to people suffering from literal and symbolic consequences of consumerism.” 

Metz agrees. Humans are hard-wired to seek out food and eat as much of it as possible, stemming from an age when food was less available and we didn't always know when we could expect our next meal. But now that food is so accessible and those genetic tendencies still remain, our waistlines are continuously growing. Not to mention, there are tremendous risks associated with stuffing the stomach to its capacity, even just one time, like rupturing the stomach, he says. "Make sure the public knows not to try this at home." 

With a sample size of only one, the researchers acknowledge that their results, for now, are only speculative. But they conclude that the glory of winning the Mustard Belt may not outweigh the serious health risks:A chronically dilated, flaccid stomach may eventually decompensate, so that it becomes an enormous sac incapable of shrinking to its original size and incapable of peristalsing or emptying solid food. If this happens, long-term competitive speed eaters ultimately could develop intractable nausea and vomiting, necessitating a partial or total gastrectomy to relieve their symptoms and restore their ability to eat. 

Thus, speed eating is a potentially self-destructive form of behavior that over time could lead to morbid obesity, intractable nausea and vomiting, and even the need for gastric surgery.

It may be potentially dangerous to eat a shit load of all this food, but these people are having fun, making a lot of money in a matter of 10 minutes, and there are much worse ways to poison your body. 

Me, I say, Yo, Joey "Jaws" Chestnut, Sonya "Black Widow' Thomas, and the other "athletes" of eating, go for it! 

Eat and let live, these American heroes of gluttony, perhaps it will even eventually become a world Olympics Sport. 

And it all began in my beloved Brooklyn, as it  should be!