David Metz has a theory, yet untested, that water-loading could be used as a therapy for dyspeptics—people whose stomachs hurt after a meal, though they appear to be healthy. A 2007 study showed that dyspeptic patients report feeling full after drinking significantly less water, as compared with a control group of healthy, nondyspeptic volunteers. Could these people take a cue from professional eaters and gradually train themselves—by conditioning their stomachs—to comfortably hold more? “I think it would be a worthwhile project,” Metz says.
Additional support for the incremental stretching theory comes from the other end of the eating spectrum—the starvation end. A surgeon-commander by the name of Markowski noted in a 1947 British Medical Journal paper that the stomachs of the World War II prisoners he treated were stretched from the large volumes of low-quality food they needed to eat to get enough calories and nutrients to survive. He surmised that the chronic stretching might weaken the organ, and that this explained why the men’s stomachs sometimes ruptured after relatively small meals. Though if this were true, you’d expect to see stomach ruptures in major-league eaters, and you don’t. I would have assumed that the prisoners’ stomachs had shrunk, and that that was why they ruptured. I asked Metz about this. He dismissed the notion that people’s stomachs shrink if they skip meals or cut way back on how much they consume. He says that when people say they feel full more quickly after eating less, it is because their tolerance for food is diminished; the feedback loops that are stimulated for hormone and enzyme production don’t work as well.
Here is what surprises me: people with capacious stomachs are no more likely to be obese. A study in the journal Obesity Surgery reported no significant differences in the size of the stomachs of morbidly obese people as compared with non-obese control subjects. It is hormones and metabolism, calories consumed and calories burned, that determine one’s weight, not holding capacity. Erik the Red insists he does not—outside of competitions—overeat, even though he never feels full. He points out that however much willpower it takes to stop eating when you’re full, it takes far more to keep going (and going).
The biggest surprise of all is that the medical literature does not contain a single case report of stomach rupture among competitive eaters. Which brings us full circle to Mr. L. and my original point. By and large, it’s not how much you eat that kills you, it’s what you eat—especially, as we’re about to see, when what you are eating is ten dozen latex bundles of cocaine.
* * *
* Though you do read case reports in which patients say they heard a bursting noise, the experience is more often described as a sensation, as in “a sensation of giving way.” The “sudden explosion” recalled by a seventy-two-year-old woman following a meal of cold meat, tea, and eight cups of water was more likely something she felt, not heard. (The old eight-cups-of-water-a-day advice should possibly be qualified with the clause, “but not all at once.”)
* With one exception. While the consumption record for many foods exceeds eight and even ten pounds, no one has ever been able to eat more than four pounds of fruit cake.
11
Up Theirs
THE ALIMENTARY CANAL AS CRIMINAL ACCOMPLICE
SHOULD CIRCUMSTANCE PREVENT a man from carrying his cigarettes and cell phone in his pants pocket, the rectum provides a workable alternative. So workable that well over a thousand pounds of tobacco and hundreds of cell phones are rectally smuggled into California state prisons each year. The contraband allows incarcerated gang members and narcotics dealers to make business calls from behind bars (and to enjoy a smoke while doing so).
“This came in on Friday.” Lieutenant Gene Parks is a contraband interdiction officer at Avenal State Prison. He is making reference to a clear plastic garbage bag two-thirds full with what appear to be but are not yams. They are plugs of Golden Leaf pipe tobacco, sheathed in latex and tapered at one end for ease of insertion, and not into pipes. The garbage bag is a “drop”—bulk contraband—that was hidden on the nearby chicken farm where two to three hundred Avenal inmates commute from the prison to work. Had Parks’s team not gotten to the bag first, the plugs would have been “keistered” by convicts into the prison yard, two or three and occasionally six at a time, and then laid like the eggs the men spend their days with.
A fruity tobacco smell has leached through the plastic. The Investigative Services Unit smells like a tobacconist’s shop. A one-pound bag of Golden Leaf tobacco retails for around $25. On the Avenal yard, an ounce sells for as much as $100, putting the yard value of that $25 bag at $1,600. The penalty, should you get caught, is mild—a temporary loss of visitor privileges. “We’ve disposed of, maybe, in the hundreds of thousands of these,” says Parks. Lieutenant Parks has wide, voltaic blue eyes and a flat, imperturbable speaking manner. The combination makes him seem at once jaded and amazed.
Parks takes me into a storage room and shows me a bank of a dozen small square lockers, one for each month’s contraband cell phones.
“All of these,” I ask, “were . . .”