Today I found out that the 7-11 Double Big Gulp holds about twice the amount of fluid than the average adult human’s stomach. The average adult human’s stomach can hold comfortably about 32 ounces at any given time (edit: excepting Americans who apparently can hold about 138 times that amount despite science’s official averages). The Double Big Gulp holds about 64 ounces of soda or Slurpee.
Now, your stomach can process liquids at about a rate of 200-400 ml an hour according to research done by Shils et al. in 1994. The rate mostly depends on what else is in your stomach at the time of digestion. Generally speaking, an empty stomach will digest the liquid fastest. This means that if you want to actually drink the entire double big gulp without needing to vomit or otherwise stretch your stomach to extremes it’s not meant to handle, the absolute quickest you could do it, assuming starting on a completely empty stomach and not lucky enough to be an American with our lifetime of practice stretching our stomachs to extremes, will be approximately 4.73 hours. So unless you like your soda or Slurpee warm and fizz-less in the former case, probably best to stay away from the Double Big Gulp. It just really isn’t going to work out for you in terms of being able to drink it all while it’s still tasty.
Next down we have the “Super Big Gulp” generally coming in at 44 oz or approximately 138% the size your stomach is comfortable expanding to. Here, the best case scenario is that you could drink it comfortably in about 3.25 hours, which is still not going to really work out for you unless you like your drinks warm and possibly fizz-less.
Now at the 32 ounce size we have two options: the classic Big Gulp or my personal favorite the “Extreme Gulp”. This is the perfect sized drink. It is exactly the same size as the average adult stomach is capable of comfortably expanding to. This means, on an empty stomach, you can chug it all down and not worry about the fact that it will take your stomach about 2.36 hours to actually process it all. And if you happen to be American and put ice in your soda unlike most of the rest of the world, then you’ll have extra room for tasty nachos to go with your gigantic soda and stomach. Sugar rushes for everyone!!!
Best of all, say you don’t want to chug it all down at once (for some odd reason). If you like ice in your drink like us Americans, the Extreme Gulp is capable of keeping the ice frozen in your drink for about 6 hours or so, give or take depending on outside temperature. Literally this thing is like a mini-cooler (and is kind of the size of one, truth to tell). So your drink stays un-watered down and icy cold for plenty of time to comfortably drink your tasty beverage, even if you happen to want to eat something and use a little room in your stomach for non-beverage purposes.
Note: a newborn baby’s stomach can only handle about 1 oz of fluids. So, until 7-11 comes out with a “Baby Gulp”, probably avoid getting them their own Big Gulp until they man-up a bit.
Just for fun, here are some bonus 7-11 Factoids
-
7-11 is the largest chain store with more than 36,842 outlets operating around the world, surpassing the previous record-holder McDonald’s Corporation in 2007 by approximately 1,000 retail stores.
- 7-Eleven pioneered the convenience store concept way back in 1927 at the Southland Ice Company in Dallas, Texas. Joe C. Thompson, the manager of the plant, started selling milk, eggs, and bread from an ice dock on Sundays and evenings when the grocery stores were closed. He eventually bought the Southland Ice Company and turned it into the Southland Corporation, thus opening the first ever “convenience” store.
- The company’s first convenience outlets were known as Tote’m stores since customers “toted” away their purchases; some even sported genuine Alaskan totem poles in the front of the stores. In 1946, Tote’m became 7-Eleven to reflect the stores’ new, extended hours – 7 a.m. until 11 p.m., seven days a week, which was pretty unheard of back then.
- 7-Eleven stores sell almost 26 million gallons of fountain drinks a year.
- 7-Eleven stores sell about 41 million gallons of milk each year.
- In anticipation of the July 2007 release of The Simpsons Movie, 7-Eleven turned 12 of its North American stores into Kwik-E-Mart, including stocking and selling a variety of their products under various Kwik-E-Mart band names.
- 7-Eleven was the first c-store retailer to give customers “freedom of choice” by offering all major soft drink brands at the fountain.
- 7-Eleven was the first retailer to offer fresh-brewed coffee in to-go cups, introducing it in their Northeast stores in 1964.
- 7-Eleven aired the first television advertising by any convenience store; the animated commercial featuring a singing owl and rooster ran in 1949.
- Japan has more 7-Eleven locations than anywhere else in the world (incidentally as of 1991 a Japanese company bought the controlling interest in 7-11) , Of the 36,000-ish stores around the globe, 12,349 of them are located in Japan with 1,577 in Tokyo alone.
- There are 1,750 7-Eleven stores in Korea, with only the United States, Japan, Taiwan and Thailand hosting more stores. Korean stores no longer carry branded products such as Slurpee or Big Gulp.
Sources:
- 7-Eleven
- 7-11 Fun Facts
- 7-11 History
- The Human Stomach
- Pictures
- ME Shils, JA Olson, and M Shike. 1994. Modern Nutrition in Health and Disease, eighth edition.
The title should be 100% more instead of 200% more. The word “more” implies it goes beyond the limit to begin with and 200% more would mean it holds 3 times the amount as opposed to 100% “More” would mean twice as much.
Argh, if this were Wikipedia, I could jump in and fix the spelling errors.
On the other hand, if this were Wikipedia, it would say “Religious pseudo-scientists believe the Double Big Gulp holds 200% more than the average adult human’s stomach, but this is disputed by college professors and rocket scientists because…”
None of these cures my thirst
you can’t drink the ice, so I’d say the thing is about normal sized…
@Zirene: Good point, but too late to fix now due to not wanting to mess with the whole permalink thing. That will teach me to write these things at 3am
@Vitero: Spelling errors? According to my spell checker, there are no spelling errors. Now Grammar errors… I pride myself on my grammar errors. If I don’t get at least 27 Grammar Nazi comments on each post, I feel I have failed somehow… Let me know where the spelling errors are and I will fix them and then take my spell checker out back and give it the beating it deserves.
It appears as if you’re assuming that you don’t pee while you’re drinking a Double Gulp. I drink one in a sitting fairly often, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t use the bathroom.
Mate, your math doesn’t work. This is because when you start with an empty stomach, you fill it up (cup 64oz – what fits comfortably to the tummy 32oz = 32oz left in the cup). Then your tummy starts digesting the liquid and thus the cup will be empty if you keep topping your stomach up every hour by 400ml in little bit less than 2 and a half hours. Your stomach will be full at this time.
So, basically you calculated who much time is needed for you stomach from empty to empty which is not what you meant (at least what I understood from you writings).
i dont think there are any 7 11s in uk wish there were
Two things:
1. Can the US PLEASE use metric measurements. No one else in the world uses ounces to measure liquids. We *used* to in the UK, but we realised in the 60s that it was stupid.
2. If you insist on using archaic measurements can you at least be consistent? In most places the article refers to ounces but when talking about the rate liquid can be processed at it uses millilitres.
Lies, I have pounded a double big gulp full of slurpee in 30min before to win a bet. It wasn’t pleasant but it’s possible.
I guess I’m a freak of nature, I can(and do so quite often) finish off a 64 oz in about an hour, and that’s with dinner…(i.e. non-empty stomach) and i don’t have to go pee at all before finishing it…
Hey , its the UK that left us with the stupid system we use. Your empire our problem. Blame the UK!
Here’s a tip: go pee about halfway though.
yeah this is bull shit. I finish the biggest gulp they have in 30 min- an hour, WHILE eating a chicken burrito. I do this 2-4 times a week. and I dont use the pisser for a few hours. SUPERIOR GENES!!!
Um… did you just make this up? Few things about your “research”
1) A quick search on Google (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stomach) shows the the adult human stomach can expand to 2-3 liters of volume.
2) Have you ever had a big gulp (64 oz)? It can EASILY be consumed in less than an hour by the average person. Not 3.25 hours as you state.
3) My personal and extensive research in college shows that I can very easily consume a 6 pack of beer in less than one hour (1 beer in less than 10 minutes), which is 72oz… and that is all liquid, no ice in that.
4)The important fact you seem to be missing is: liquids are not stored in the stomach. They are co-transported out (in the presence of sugar) through the stomach wall OR pass on to the intestines and are absorbed in the colon. Using the volume of the stomach as a gauge of how much you can drink is like using the volume of your garden hose to determine how much you can water your lawn.
5) What the hell are you thinking?
@buddgog: No
1) Did you miss the part how on wikipedia where the reputable source (with medical citation) says 1 liter along with a bagillion other medical journals out there that say the same thing: “It normally expands to hold about 1 litre of food”. Sure you can go bigger than that, but it’s not healthy nor will feel too comfortable, as stated in this article.
2) Yes I have had many and in fact was drinking one when I was trying to decide what to do an article on “today”. You aren’t factoring in ice nor the whole part where i said something your body can handle comfortably. Now granted, Americans have gotten used to over expanding their stomachs drastically, so there is that to consider. But medically, research has shown you can process liquids at the rate I stated and comfortably expand your stomach to about 1 liter. The math is simple after that.
3) Not something that I would brag about
4) Doesn’t matter, the number I was using in the calculation was the research done in the 1990s on how fast the body can handle liquids.
5) Thinking it’s an interesting article and something fun to think about, but not to be taken too seriously as everybody’s stomach is different and rate of digestion; I’m just using established medical averages here. Judging from the roughly 50,000 hits to date this article has gotten since it was posted, I don’t think I’m the only one that finds these sorts of trivial number crunching interesting.
But again, not to be taken too seriously as any time you are using averages over a sample-space of about 7 billion entities, particularly in this case with extreme diversification in intake they’ve accustomed their bodies to, you are going to get a huge number of the entities falling outside the predicted range using the medically established averages.
Just thought I would add that im pretty sure its not just the americans that put ice in their drinks. Its pretty commonplace anywhere i have been..
Interesting article, but I could do without the American bashing. We’re not all like that you know.
Wonder why in other countries, there are no such pig disgusting super-sized stuff.
I drink double gulps all the time and I am 6′, 200lbs, which is a pretty average size. I can finish one in around 45 minutes to an hour.(I have finished them in around 15 minutes) So this entire article is wrong.
This person must not drink beer either. Pretty sure you can drink more than three in an hour
How come no one ever bothers to consider that the cups are filled with ice cubes first? You should know we Americans like our ice. So, if you have a 64 oz cup, filled at LEAST 3/4 full of ice cubes, how much volume of liquid is the cup actually holding? My best guess is less than half, or 32 oz. I think we make the cups that big mainly so you can have some liquid with all the ice we put in it.
get a photo of the gulf of Mexico put your logo on it and call it the gulp of Mexico.
eaaarghh. that’s insane.
congratulations, humanity. you are fucking disgusting.
Pic related: http://www.andrewhussie.com/archive/Special_Olympics/misc/00001.gif
Obviously never had a childhood, or a significant amount of beer.
Part 1: A typical dinner out for my family, & guests includes at least 13oz wine, 16oz water, 10oz coffee..39oz of liquid minimum each, plus salad, appetizers, a main course, & desert, usually within the space of an hour. No discomfort, & we didn’t begin with empty stomachs. (Incidentally, we aren’t overweight.) Your figures are obviously askew.
@m: So you are telling me you consume almost 2.5 pounds of liquid (about 1/3 of a gallon) and then salad, appetizers, a main course, and dessert in an hour? You guys should go compete in one of those “2-3 pound Steak Competitions”. You’d win every time.
Seriously though, if you are really eating like that, you are grossly over-stretching your stomach. This is very unhealthy. An average mixture of food/liquid (depends on the food of course, but in general) takes nearly 5 hours for your body to process from healthily full to empty. Slow down a bit their on your consumption rates. Give your body a chance to catch up. You can read more on this here.
WHAT THE FUCK!!! Is this dude saying that all americans are fat??
I have drank an entire double gulp and eating a slice of pizza. I am 5’0 and 90 lbs. while getting a tattoo, and I didnt use the bathroom once. I am a little upset by this fucking asshole article implying that all AMERICANS are FAT. WELL YOU CAN GO FUCK YOUR DICK WHILE MASTERBATING ASSHOLE!!
Current Double Gulp cups only hold about 58 ounces….measured it last night. It held 6 cups (8 x 6 = 48), and then another 9.5-10 ounces. That is filling it to the very top!