50 burgers, 10 kebabs, 4 gigas tacos, 150 yakitoris… These gargantuan quantities of food are ingested in front of the camera by “AlanFood Challenge”, a youtuber with more than 830,000 subscribers who specializes in these extraordinary food contests. For a week, the young man has been accused of cheating. He allegedly cut snippets of his videos and therefore did not eat the claimed amounts. The content creator ended up spilling the beans and confessed to having faked three videos. His justification: “You know, something that weighs 16 kg is difficult. The challenges are getting crazier and crazier, it was rising crescendo. At some point, the human body makes it impossible for you to eat any more. »
Do we really have to hold it against him? Because beyond the controversy, the consequences of such challenges on health are disastrous. Sandra Ferreira, dietitian nutritionist in Paris and in the Yvelines, answered questions from 20 minutes on the impact of these extraordinary competitions on the bodies of the participants. Spoiler alert: it’s not pretty.
Already, is it physically possible to eat such quantities of food?
A full stomach can hold up to four liters. I say “can”, which means that not everyone is capable of it. It also depends on the type of food eaten. Those with a lot of fiber take up more space. So four liters is the equivalent of a maximum of two kilos of food not fibrous.
There are other things that come into play. In some people, satiety hormones are out of whack. In the body, there are two types of hormones related to hunger. Leptin, the satiety hormone secreted by the stomach, informs us that we are no longer hungry. And ghrelin tells us when we’re hungry. Some people have a lot of ghrelin and very little, if any, leptin. There are very specific diseases in which you never feel satiety. It’s possible that this youtuber has this. But here, I go far…
Beyond the fact of being hungry or not, if we come back to the physiological possibility…
The stomach is a kind of J-shaped pouch. In some people, it can be hyperelastic. In particular, the question arises in polyphagous patients, who have bulimia attacks, whether their stomach could exceed these four liters because they sometimes swallow enormous quantities of food. In Japan, for example, a person ate 97 hamburgers in eight minutes and it was checked by bailiffs. Like what there can be exceptional cases. It is also possible – but here I go really very far – to have hyper-rapid digestion. But it would be truly exceptional… and it must be said above all that this type of competition is extremely risky.
Precisely, what happens in the very short term in our body when we ingest such large quantities of food?
The first risk is suffocation, asphyxiation. If the stomach does not have time to digest and the food goes up into the esophagus, you can no longer breathe because the tubes communicate at the very top, at the level of the trachea. In the United States, there have already been cases of choking during these competitions. There is also a high likelihood of indigestion, with nausea, vomiting, hot flashes. You may have abdominal pain because the stomach is distended too much. There is also a risk of perforation of the stomach. It is very very rare but at the same time it is very rare to eat such quantities.
And in the medium term?
In the hours that follow, there is a high probability of having reactive diarrhea. The food is first crushed by the teeth, then by the stomach thanks to the gastric juices. But when the food arrives in too large quantities and in a short time in the stomach, it will quickly pass it into the intestine, which does not have time to manage all this quantity and it will come out in diarrhea.
This type of practice must also have an impact on long-term health, with associated pathologies…?
Absolutely. If you don’t make yourself vomit, it must cause cholesterol, diabetes, hypertriglyceridemia – too high a level of triglycerides in the body – and obesity. Basically, it damages the arteries and is bad for the cardiovascular system. If we go further, severe obesity more often gives rise to myocardial infarction. But you can absolutely not be obese and have very high cholesterol levels, with arteries that gradually clog.
Beyond the physical aspect, can these repeated challenges create eating disorders?
Of course. If we are not subject to the hormonal imbalances we were talking about earlier, these challenges will skew our natural signs of hunger and satiety, because we are going against the message sent by our body. This can gradually disrupt the body and greatly increase the risk of developing eating disorders.