• Can eating too much make your stomach burst?

    Getty Images stock

    Can you actually eat yourself to death?

    By Melissa Dahl

    "I ate so much I'm about to burst!"

    Someone at your Thanksgiving table will likely say some version of this tomorrow, after you've all stuffed your faces with turkey, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes and the rest. But how much would you have to eat in order for your stomach to actually burst? Is that even possible?

    "Interestingly enough, you can rupture your stomach if you eat too much," says Dr. Rachel Vreeman, co-author of "Don't Cross Your Eyes ... They'll Get Stuck That Way!" and assistant professor of pediatrics at Indiana University School of Medicine. "It is possible, but it's very, very rare."

    A handful of reports over the years document the tales of people who literally ate themselves to death, or at least came dangerously close: Japanese doctors wrote in a 2003 case report that they believed it was a 49-year-old man's "excessive over-eating" that caused his stomach to rupture, killing him. And this 1991 case report describes a similar "spontaneous rupture" in an adult's stomach "after overindulgence in food and drink." 

    Normally, your stomach can hold about one or one-and-a-half liters, Vreeman says -- this is the point you may reach if you overdo it tomorrow, when you feel full to the point of nausea. Pathologists' reports seem to suggest the stomach is able to do OK handling up to about three liters, but most cases of rupture seem to occur when a person has attempted to stuff their stomach with about five liters of food or fluid. (One of the reports Vreeman came across described the sad case of a woman whose stomach contained 12 liters of stuff.)

    It takes a certain amount of misguided determination to manage to override your natural gag reflex and continue to eat (and eat and eat), which is why, not surprisingly, reports of ruptured stomachs caused by overeating are most common in people with some sort of disordered eating, or limited mental capacity, Vreeman says. 

    "They have unusual eating habits to an extent that their bodies’ reflexes no longer respond as they normally do," Vreeman explains. "Their bodies’ reflexes have been ignored or abused for so long that they no longer vomit at the appropriate time. And then once the stomach gets to this extremely distended point, the stomach muscles are too stretched out to be strong enough to vomit the food out."

    Speaking of strong stomachs, you'd best have one in order to read this next paragraph. If vomiting isn't happening, all that food and fluid still has to go somewhere. The increasing volume of stuff in the gut puts pressure on the stomach's walls, so much so that the tissue weakens and tears, sending the stomach contents into the body and causing infection and pain, Vreeman says. Surgical intervention is necessary to repair a ruptured stomach and save the patient's life. 

    In particular, she says, anorexics or bulimics may be at risk. In fact, Cedars-Sinai, the non-profit hospital in Los Angeles, actually lists this as a "symptom" of bulimia: "In rare cases, a person may eat so much during a binge that the stomach bursts or the esophagus tears. This can be life-threatening."

    Other reported cases of spontaneous stomach rupture happen in individuals with Prader-Willi syndrome, a congenital disease that is characterized by, among other things, a kind of disordered eating: an "intense craving for food," resulting in "uncontrollable weight gain and morbid obesity." according to the National Institutes of Health. In a 2007 study examining the deaths of 152 individuals with the condition, 3 percent of those deaths were the result of gastric rupture and necrosis. 

    The takeaway here: This really happens, sometimes! Also: This is probably not going to happen to you. 

    "Even if you're starting to feel a bit sick or tired and overwhelmed from eating so much at Thanksgiving, you're still far, far away from the scenario where you're going to make your stomach actually explode," Vreeman assures. 

    Related:

    Want more weird health news? Find The Body Odd on Facebook.

  • Anti-Thanksgiving? Complaining can be a good thing

    By Melissa Dahl

    If Thanksgiving weekend is a time for gratitude, let's make the weekend before the holiday a time for whining. Actually, two studies out this week explore the upside of negative thinking. Sometimes, believing that everything's the worst can ultimately be for the best, the research suggests.

    Fun fact 1: Complaining can help inspire people to change a bad situation. “In order to actually change the system, you’ve got to know what’s wrong with it,” says India Johnson, a graduate student at Ohio State University who helped lead a study set to appear in the journal Psychological Science.

    Study participants read about a student at the Ohio university who wasn't happy with his experience with the school's freshman orientation. Some of the stories detailed the student's successful attempt to improve the orientation process; others read about the student's failure to do so. Then the volunteers were given an external review of the university from the Department of Education -- they could choose between reading a positive or negative report.

    Interestingly, the students who'd read about the successful changes made to the freshman orientation were more likely to choose the negative report. Johnson explains, “In order for people to feel like they can actually affect the world and actually do something, they have to view the world as changeable. If you want people to be able to make that leap, you have to first get them to that point. Then they’ll be willing to seek out the negative information." 

    Fun fact 2: The best two words to motivate an expert may be, "You stink!" Newbies thrive on positive feedback, but when you're dealing with a pro, it may be best to give it to him straight, according to a new study appearing in the Journal of Consumer Research.

    In one study, researchers Stacey Finkelstein and Ayelet Fishbach, both of the University of Chicago, examined reactions of beginning and advanced French students. Those who were just starting the language were more likely to improve if their instructor gave them gentle feedback, but the old-timers thrived on harsh criticism. Like the Ohio State study, the research suggests that negative words can bring about positive change.

    What's bugging you today? Get out your complaints in the comments so you'll be ready to give thanks on Thursday.

    Related:

    Want more weird health news? Find The Body Odd on Facebook.

  • Thanksgiving dinner may curb holiday spending, study shows

    Make your post-Thanksgiving food coma work for you: New research suggests that eating a big turkey dinner may keep you from spending impulsively on holiday sales.

    The study, published in the December issue of the Journal of Marketing, builds on the turkey-tryptophan trope that we all hear this time of year -- it's practically guaranteed that somebody at your Thanksgiving gathering will say,"Did you guys know that turkey makes you sleepy?" That's only kind of true -- an amino acid called tryptophan is found in turkey, and it does work as a natural sedative, but we really don't eat enough of it, even at Thanksgiving, to be affected. Our after-dinner lethargy is more likely caused by overindulging on delicious carbs and cocktails.

    But the body uses tryptophan to produce serotonin, and serotonin is known to inhibit impulsive behavior, which made researchers from the University of Utah curious: How might Thanksgiving dinner affect Black Friday binge buying?

    To find out, they recruited 170 volunteers and instructed them to fill out an online survey on Thanksgiving evening in 2007. They rated how likely they were to buy popular items at a deep discount -- such as a Dell laptop marked down to $499. Those who had consumed a traditional Thanksgiving dinner were less likely to splurge on any of the marked-down items, say Arul Mishra and Himanshu Mishra, the University of Utah marketing professors that co-authored the study. (Fun fact: They're also husband and wife.)

    Of course, as Himanshu Mishra points out, "The influences are not going to be there after 12 hours. If someone is going out shopping tomorrow morning, probably the person will not see that effect." So here's how to make these new findings work for your wallet: Either skip the shopping on Friday and do your holiday shopping online Thursday night, or load up on leftovers before heading out to the stores on Friday.

    Would you give this a try? Or is impulse shopping on Black Friday half the fun?

    Find The Body Odd on Twitter and Facebook.

    Want more weird health news? Find The Body Odd on Facebook.

  • Keep your holiday guests calm. Show them a picture of the turkey

    AP

    If you really want your Thanksgiving dinner guests to be nice to each other, maybe you should show them pictures of the turkey.

    Forget the cheese straws or veggies and dip this Thanksgiving. New research suggests that if you really want your Thanksgiving dinner crowd to be nice to each other, you may just want to show them pictures of the turkey before you’ve popped it in the oven.

    According to a new study, meat doesn’t just give us strength or the occasional bit of indigestion, it actually makes us less aggressive.

    Curious as to whether images of meat would trigger our inner caveman aggression (the drive that facilitated the ability of our ancestors to hunt and survive), researchers at McGill University in Montreal divided 82 male undergrads into three groups in order to participate in what they were told was a “multitasking” experiment.

    Each group was asked to sort through various pictures – either pictures of raw meat, guns or geometric shapes – while they evaluated another participant reciting a script. Whenever the person reading “forgot” their lines (researchers asked the reader to do this six times), students would administer a dummy “tone blast” that ranged from “barely noticeable” to “very painful.”

    As it turned out, people were less likely to zap their associates when they saw pictures of raw meat.

    “The meat group was significantly less aggressive,” says psychology researcher Frank Kachanoff. “The tone blasts they chose were less painful than participants in the geometric shape group.” The findings were presented at a recent symposium.

    Kachanoff says he believes there’s a logical reason why pictures of raw meat triggered less aggression.

    “I only showed pictures of meat ready to cook, not pictures of an animal,” he says. “The main aggression of killing the animal would have already been done. In my next experiment, I’d like to see if images of live animals would prime aggression.” The results would likely be the same if the participants were looking at cooked meat, Kachanoff says.

    Daniel Printz, a 42-year-old estate planning lawyer (and meat eater) from San Diego says looking at raw meat certainly doesn’t make him feel aggressive.

    For thousands of years, we saw raw meat every day and we saw it as a sign of accomplishment in that we’d brought something down during the hunt,” Printz says. “But nowadays, it simply involves a butcher shop. I don’t feel that looking at meat in any form makes me aggressive. If it’s raw meat, I feel a little bit uneasy. It’s disquieting.”

    Cooked meat, on the other hand, tends to make him “happy.”

    Ah, but what about those agitating geometric shapes?

    Even though Kachanoff thought of the shapes were a neutral image,“it’s always possible that the people in the geometric shape group didn’t like geometric shapes.” The people shown the guns had the same reaction as the geometric group.

    So, if you want to avoid family arguments before the big dinner, skip the triangle-fold napkins and let your guests watch the cooking bird via a turkey cam.

    Find The Body Odd on Twitter and Facebook.

    Want more weird health news? Find The Body Odd on Facebook.

Advertise | AdChoices