19,600 calories in store for Nathan’s hot dog champ

19,600 calories in store for Nathan’s hot dog champ

A total of 19,600 calories and 1,280 grams of fat will be consumed on July 4 by any competitive eater in the 2008 Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest in New York who matches the current world record, according to CalorieLab’s calculations. Pictured here is an FDA-format Nutrition Facts label showing the nutrient value of Joey Chestnut’s 2007 world record of 66 Nathan’s Famous hot dogs, eaten in 12 minutes.

Former CalorieLab columnist Susan McQuillan, a New York registered dietitian and author of “Breaking the Bonds of Food Addiction” and “Low-Calorie Dieting for Dummies,” takes her daughter to Coney Island at least once every summer, and they always stop for a Nathan’s Famous hot dog lunch. She thinks an occasional fast food treat is fine and has even been known to treat herself to the occasional “slider” from White Castle.

But Ms. McQuillan finds the meal that the Nathan’s competitors will be eating this Independence Day a bit hard to swallow. “In a matter of minutes, they will consume more than a week’s worth of calories, 7 times the recommended daily limit for cholesterol, 20 times the daily limit for total fat, 25 times the limit for saturated fat, and two and a half weeks worth of sodium.”

There’s no upside to this meal, says McQuillan, who cannot recommend that the non-competitive eater even try it. But for the contestants, “at least there’s some fiber to help clear out some of that fat!”

Using the nutritional data disclosed in the past by a franchisee of Nathan’s Famous as well as data recently disclosed on Nathan’s Famous menus in the New York area, CalorieLab estimated the nutrient value for 66 hot dogs and computed the percentage of U.S. government recommended Daily Values represented by each nutrient.

The world record 66 hot dog meal exceeds the highest calorie meal in CalorieLab’s database of over 500 restaurants and fast food chains, the ‘100-by-100′ hamburger from West Coast chain In-n-Out Burger, which according to our calculations contains 19,300 calories and 1,409 grams of fat.

The In-n-Out Burger 100-by-100, which contains a hundred beef patties and a hundred slices of cheese, is part of In-n-Out Burger’s “Secret Menu.” According to fast food lore, it has only been occasionally ordered as a stunt by college fraternity members. No single individual has been officially documented to have actually consumed an entire 100-by-100.

The world record Nutrition Facts label is being made available in GIF, a smaller version in JPEG, and vector versions in SVG and EPS format for use online or in print. CalorieLab previously released a Nutrition Facts label for Takeru Kobayashi’s old record of 53.5 hot dogs.