What Would Happen If . . .

You Ate as Many Cookies as Cookie Monster?

WHEN IT’S EMPTY, your stomach is about the same size as your fist and frustratingly limited during feasts. Fortunately, its walls are stretchy, so when cookies are offered for dessert you’re able to eat one, two, three, four . . .

But a stomach can’t stretch forever, and the muscles involved in food swallowing are powerful enough to force more cookies into your stomach than it can handle.

That can lead to an issue.

The expert on cookie stuffing is, of course, Cookie Monster. For the record, he’s appeared in 4,378 Sesame Street episodes, and an unscientific survey reveals that he eats approximately 3 cookies per episode. That’s a total of 13,134 cookies consumed. Although that’s a big number, when you spread it out over a 45-year TV run it’s perfectly safe.

But what if you were to give Cookie Monster a run for his money and eat all those cookies in one sitting?

Satiety is the medical term for being stuffed. It’s a complicated process that involves not just the quantity of food consumed but also the kind of calories it contains. Different calories trigger different responses—protein and fiber increase satiety while carbohydrates and fats have less effect.

The signal from your stomach to your brain is also a bit delayed—it can take fifteen to twenty minutes for your brain to get the message, which means the faster you eat, the more cookies you can jam into your stomach before you realize there’s an overfull issue.

Most people are typically satiated after about 25 cookies’ worth of food—more or less what Cookie Monster eats in a single frenzy. Of course, stomachs are stretchy, so 25 is not the physical limit, and competitive eaters have a few tricks to stretch it.

First, a thin physique helps. Exactly how you can stay thin while eating 11 pounds of cookies is a bit of a paradox, but it’s true that with less fat in the way your stomach has more room to expand outward.

Second, in preparation for eating all those cookies, you could to do some limbering up. Eating low-calorie, high-volume food (like grapes) the night before would stretch your stomach and help make it ready to stretch again.

For Cookie Monster and you, the 60-cookie mark is where things would start to get difficult. (To be clear, we’re talking about an average-size chocolate chip cookie, not one of those cookie behemoths.)

Unless you have eaten 60 cookies many times (and thus suppressed your gag reflex), your stomach will revolt and you will vomit. But that’s a good thing: 60 cookies equals roughly 4 liters of food, and that’s approaching your stomach’s breaking point.*

We know the physical limit of the stomach thanks to the German physician Algot Key-Aberg, who in the late 1800s attempted to cleanse a patient of an opium overdose by pumping water into his stomach. Unfortunately, the patient’s drug use suppressed the normal vomiting response and his stomach broke like an overfilled water balloon, killing him on the operating table.

This event piqued Key-Aberg’s curiosity and he began experimenting to determine the true capacity of a stretched human stomach using corpses. He concluded that the typical stomach can hold 4 liters of food before eruption. (Imagine two party-size sodas next to each other. If you eat or drink more than that, you are approaching what we will call here the stomach eruption limit.)

This limit applies to all of us, except, however, for a gifted few. A small number of people have publicly passed the 4-liter mark. Depending on your training, or whether you received the genetic gift of a flexible stomach, it is possible to eat more. Joey Chestnut, the reigning hot-dog-eating champion, once ate 69 hot dogs in 10 minutes. That’s approximately 9.5 liters of food—or 130 chocolate chip cookies.

But let’s say you lack any genetic stomach gifts. You would begin to run into real trouble at the 90-cookie mark, or about 6 liters of food.

The weakest part of the stomach is the lesser curvature. If you imagine your stomach looking like a kidney bean, the lesser curvature is the area that bends inward. This is where the cookies would initially break through.

The body’s innards have little defense against the bacteria that live on cookies. Clostridium perfringens,* otherwise known as gas gangrene, starts to grow in your gut as soon as the cookies bust out. It destroys live tissue and produces gas that explodes and distributes dead and rotting material throughout your guts.

In response to the massive bacterial invasion, your immune system would send an overwhelming amount of chemicals to the infected area. This is known as septic shock and constitutes a body’s defense to widespread infection. It can be so overwhelming that the response itself can kill you. How? Inflammation, blood clots, and decreased blood flow. The pulse picks up to try to get more blood to vital organs, the body temperature drops, often dangerously, and gas gangrene can appear.

This infection lives within a protective cocoon of dead tissue, outside the reach of white blood cells and antibacterials. Once the body progresses to this stage, which it would do rapidly, you would be unlikely to survive even with skilled medical care. Within an hour your heart would not receive enough oxygen to keep beating and you would go into cardiac arrest followed quickly by total brain death.

All that being said, it’s possible that you would actually die before that. Remember that a typical unstretched stomach is the size of your fist. After you have filled it with 6 liters’ worth of cookies, that stomach would now be more than 20 times its normal size. This begins to get in the way of other bodily functions. The vein that runs below the stomach and returns blood from the bowels to the heart would be pinched shut.

Then there’s the breathing problem. The stomach’s upward growth can also compromise your lungs. At 20 times normal size, your stomach would have grown into your lung space and you would be suffocating on cookies.

Between suffocation, stomach explosion, and bowel death from oxygen starvation (never mind septic shock), the medical battle to save you would be very close, and in the end would probably depend on the amount of gas produced during digestion. After 60-some-odd cookies, the gaseous side effects of digestion might push the pressure of your stomach beyond its physical capacity. It could explode violently and distribute its fatal chocolate chip cookie content throughout your innards.

In other words, death by burping.