#Competitive hot dog eaters are near peak human ability, study finds

Competitive eaters are physically capable of gobbling down 84 hot dogs in ten minutes — nine more than the world record set by Chestnut earlier this month, according to a sports study published Wednesday.

The theoretical speed eating performance standard, based on 39 years of data from Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest in Brooklyn, was outlined in research that used mathematical modeling to project trends over time.

It predicts that the sausage chompers will continue to set records based on a so-called “sigmoidal curve” — a slow and steady rise, followed by an era of rapid improvement before leveling off, according to the study, published in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters.

“Hotdog eating has definitely reached that second plateau,” the report’s author, James Smoliga of High Point University, told The Guardian. “Humans are able to eat faster than bears or coyotes.”

The Nathan’s contest, which has been held annually for 104 years, started off mostly featuring “big obese guys” but they soon didn’t cut the mustard, the study notes.

By the 1990s, extreme eaters from Japan — many of them in great physical shape, such as Takeru Kobayashi — began crushing wiener records.

“It wasn’t just people with big appetites any more,” Smoliga said, adding that the number of hot dogs eaten by competitors has steadily gone up since then.

These days, top dog speed eaters have nailed a combination of training and physical fitness, leading Smoliga to predict that performances will continue to improve.

Smoliga said his prediction will prove to be true unless a “new kind of competitor” shows up — such as a person with gigantism or a rare metabolic condition — that allows him to go beyond the normal limits of human biology.