Joey Chestnut Finished 8 Pounds of Deep Dish in About 12 Minutes. Three Thanksgiving Dinners, One Stomach.

At noon on Saturday in Princeton Heights, on the south side of St. Louis, a bar that used to be Louie’s put an 8-pound Chicago-style deep-dish pizza in front of Joey Chestnut and started a 45-minute clock. He needed about 12 of those minutes, the bar says. The Salvage Yard Bar and Grill called it the 1st Annual Junk Yard Dog Challenge: one pizza, “loaded with meat, cheese and sauce,” for Chestnut and two St. Louis-area competitive eaters, with a meet-and-greet beforehand for the people whose names came out of the ticket raffle. Two weeks ago the same man ate 16 pounds of baked beans with a ladle in a MrBeast video that has passed 268 million views. Fifteen weeks ago he ate 66 hot dogs and buns in 10 minutes on Coney Island for his 18th Nathan’s title. On Saturday it was pizza, and the question that fills the search box every time he sits down is the one this page answers: what does a stomach have to do to take that in?

This is not a story about Chestnut’s body. He has said almost nothing about it in public beyond a few lines about rhythm and naps, and we print only those. It is a story about three numbers: what 8 pounds of deep dish adds up to by the government’s own food tables, what the only published study of a top speed eater’s stomach actually saw on a live X-ray in 2007, and how the ordinary stomach on an ordinary Thanksgiving does a smaller version of the same thing. The result, as the bar reported it, is in the dated box at the top of this page.

The year: Hot dogs, wings, pancakes, beans, and now a pizza the weight of a bowling ball

Chestnut’s 2026 reads like a county-fair menu. On July 4 he regained the Mustard Yellow Belt at Nathan’s Famous with 66 hot dogs and buns in 10 minutes, Major League Eating reported, 15 clear of Patrick Bertoletti, for what the league counted as his 18th win. On August 30 he posted that he had “just won the Buffalo Wing Festival eating competition with 240+ wings” and been named a Legend of the event. On September 26, at the second World Pancake Eating Championship in Williamsburg, Virginia, he ate 40 pancakes in 10 minutes, Dexerto reported, five past the mark Geoff Esper set at the first edition a year earlier; Max Stanford was second with 28. Asked beforehand how a pancake contest is won, he told a local outlet it comes down to “that perfect rhythm of breathing and biting, chewing and swallowing.” On October 10 he was at TenderFest Chicago at Navy Pier, where, by his own posts, fans could enter a chicken-tender contest against him.

The clip that put him in front of a new audience came between the pancakes and the tenders. On October 3 MrBeast uploaded “Eat Everything In A Grocery Store, Win $1,000,000,” a 58-minute video in which four contestants who had lived inside a stocked grocery store for months faced a last challenge: finish 8 pounds of baked beans, with MrBeast eating alongside them, before Chestnut finished 16 pounds on his own, with a ladle. The contestants won cars. Chestnut got a MrBeast belt. The next day MrBeast posted that it was his “most viewed video ever in 24 hours,” past 70 million views on day one, Dexerto reported. MrBeast called the beans a world record; Major League Eating’s own list still shows Gideon Oji’s 10 pounds in 1 minute 45 seconds, because the league times its records and the video did not. Either way, the beans are why people who have never watched a hot dog contest know who sat down in St. Louis on Saturday.

The number: What 8 pounds of deep dish adds up to, by the USDA’s own tables

The bar has not published what goes into its pizza, so the honest way to count it is the government’s way. The USDA’s food survey database lists “Pizza with extra meat, thick crust” at 278 calories per 100 grams and “Pizza, extra cheese, thick crust” at 272. Eight pounds is 3,629 grams. Multiply, and the meat version comes to about 10,100 calories and the cheese version to about 9,900: roughly 10,000 calories by USDA thick-crust values, our arithmetic, with the real figure depending on a recipe nobody outside the kitchen has seen. For scale, the University at Buffalo’s clinical nutrition program puts a typical Thanksgiving meal, turkey through pie, at 3,000 to 4,500 calories before drinks and snacks. The pizza is about three of those at the low end, in 45 minutes, and he is not expected to stop at a slice.

The X-ray: The one time scientists watched a top speed eater’s stomach work

Only one published study has ever put a competitive eater on a live X-ray while he competed, and it is the study behind every “competitive eater stomach” search. In 2007, Marc Levine, David Metz and colleagues at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania invited a 29-year-old man ranked in the world’s top 10 and a 35-year-old volunteer with, in the researchers’ words, a hearty appetite, into their X-ray suite. The purpose, the paper says, was “to determine how competitive speed eaters are able to eat so much so fast.” Both men drank barium so the stomach would show, and both were handed hot dogs without buns. The volunteer stopped at seven, uncomfortably full. The speed eater ate two at a time and had put away 36 in 10 minutes, one every 17 seconds, when the researchers ended the test over his objection, because his abdomen had grown so large they feared the stomach could tear.

What the screen showed is the finding. The eater’s stomach had stretched into a food-filled sac that filled most of his upper abdomen. It showed little or no peristalsis, the rolling squeeze that normally works food toward the exit, and only a trickle of barium was passing into the first stretch of the small intestine. The paper’s conclusion puts it in one sentence: successful speed eaters “expand the stomach to form an enormous flaccid sac capable of accommodating huge amounts of food.” The stomach was not emptying faster to make room. It was simply, enormously, holding.

The second measurement is the one that answers the questions people type after the contest is over. On a separate day the team fed both men a standard test meal tagged with a tracer and scanned how much had left the stomach after two hours. The volunteer’s stomach had emptied 75 percent. The speed eater’s had emptied 25 percent; Penn’s normal cut-off was anything above 50. That is a stomach built to hold, and a stomach built to hold is slow to let go. For the general picture, a 2000 study of 123 healthy volunteers at 11 centers found that the typical stomach still held about a quarter of a light egg meal at two hours and almost nothing by four; keeping more than a tenth at four hours is the usual line for slow emptying. One eater is one eater, and the authors said so. But that is the whole published record of what a trained speed eater’s stomach looks like from the inside, and it is the mechanism by which 8 pounds of pizza can go in at all.

The questions: What people search after a Chestnut contest, answered only with what is on the record

Autocomplete fills in the rest of the sentence for anyone who types his name and the word stomach: capacity, X-ray, before and after, does he throw up, how do competitive eaters poop. The honest answers are shorter than the questions. No X-ray of Chestnut’s stomach has ever been published; the images people share are the 2007 Penn eater’s, and the Penn paper never names him. On the bathroom, Chestnut has given the plainest answer himself, to Insider in 2021: “It’s natural. If you eat a lot of food, you’re going to go to the bathroom.” On how he feels afterward: “Most people relate to feeling really bloated and tired after Thanksgiving. It’s kind of like that, except really, really bad.” He does his interviews, he said, then naps, and the hot dogs wake him a few hours later. He has not described throwing up after a contest in anything we could find, and we do not guess. The 2007 paper offers the general mechanism for the slow day after: a stomach that emptied a quarter of a meal in two hours is still working on lunch at dinnertime.

On whether the sport is safe, we print two sources and no opinion. The Penn authors wrote in 2007 that “competitive speed eating is a potentially self-destructive form of behavior” and speculated, from their one subject, about what years of it might do to a stomach; that is their view of the sport, not a finding about any named eater. Major League Eating’s safety page says the league sanctions contests only with an emergency medical technician present and only for adults, and “strongly opposes and discourages home training of any kind.” Chestnut has competed under those rules for two decades, and this article describes neither his health nor anyone else’s.

The rest of us: A Thanksgiving plate is the same reflex at a fraction of the load

The stomach that took 36 hot dogs is doing, at scale, what yours does at every big meal. As food arrives, the upper stomach relaxes to make room before pressure builds, a reflex a 2006 review in the journal Gut calls “an important mechanism of normal gastric physiology.” How far that stretch normally goes was measured directly in a 1988 study, in which a balloon in the stomach was filled with water until volunteers rated the discomfort at its maximum: about 1.1 liters in the lean adults, in a study of eight people. Eight pounds of pizza weighs about 3.6 kilograms, which, if pizza were as dense as water, is more than three times that, our arithmetic. The speed eater’s advantage is not a different reflex. It is the same one, trained for years past the point where the rest of us put down the fork, and Major League Eating’s own position is that nobody should try to copy it at home.

So the Thanksgiving plate is the everyday version: 3,000 to 4,500 calories by the Buffalo estimate, an upper stomach that relaxes to take it, and a slow, heavy evening while a stomach that has been asked to hold more than usual lets it go at its own pace. In two weeks Halloween lands on a Saturday, and the question will be candy; our ranking of Halloween candy by fiber is the reading for that one. On Saturday the question was a pizza, a 45-minute clock and a man who says his strength is rhythm. The box at the top of this page says how it went: about 12 minutes, by the bar’s count.

Who paid whom: Chestnut’s Instagram carries sponsored posts for a Dr. Tobias 14-day colon-cleanse product on August 18 and September 21, 2026, labelled #Sponsored; this article makes no claim about that product. His October 3 and 6 posts promote TenderFest Chicago, a commercial event, and his MrBeast appearance was part of a MrBeast production. The Junk Yard Dog Challenge is the Salvage Yard Bar and Grill’s event. Gut Health Times has no relationship with Chestnut, Major League Eating, Nathan’s Famous, MrBeast, Dr. Tobias, TenderFest, the Salvage Yard, the University of Pennsylvania or any outlet cited, and received nothing for this article.

Facts to carry: Joey Chestnut finished an 8-pound Chicago-style deep-dish pizza in about 12 minutes, by the bar’s own account, against a 45-minute limit, at noon Central on Saturday, October 17, 2026, at the Salvage Yard Bar and Grill, 5406 Hampton Avenue, St. Louis, alongside two St. Louis-area eaters, after a year of 66 hot dogs and buns at Nathan’s, 240-plus wings in Buffalo, 40 pancakes in Williamsburg and 16 pounds of baked beans in a MrBeast video that MrBeast called his most viewed ever in 24 hours. Eight pounds of thick-crust meat pizza is roughly 10,000 calories by USDA values, our arithmetic, about three Thanksgiving dinners by a University at Buffalo estimate. In the only published X-ray study of a top speed eater, in 2007, the eater took in 36 bun-less hot dogs in 10 minutes before the researchers stopped him, his stomach became “an enormous flaccid sac” with little or no squeezing motion, and it had emptied 25 percent of a test meal at two hours against the control’s 75 percent. A lean adult’s stomach held about 1.1 liters when filled to the limit in a 1988 study, and the upper stomach relaxes to receive every meal. Nothing here describes Chestnut’s health beyond his own public words. The article is educational, describes what the cited studies and sources say, and is not medical advice.