You can eat & absorb 2.5x your calorie needs

[Pancakes]

So basically, people shouldn't eat more than 5000-7500 calories per day (depending on their size) because they'll just poop it out. That's actually good to know. Saves a lot of waste. That is unless they're just trying to see how stuffed they can get.

[Pancakes]

2 hours ago, John Smith said:

The average people. How about people endowed by a very high metabolism or high level athletes?

I didn't actually read the article (shame, I know, but NYT paywall), but I presume the absorption of calories isn't determined by the person's basal metabolic rate but is determined by other factors. Granted, that's a pretty large presumption, but I would guess that the intestinal absorption rate of calories is not substantially different from an athletically active individual and a non-active individual of similar body type. Though I suppose protein and carbohydrate transporters could be up/downregulated in the gut.

[Pancakes]

4 minutes ago, Grumbar11 said:

More like 3500-10000+. You have to account for height, weight, activity level, age, etc. They did in the paper the article is working off. And other scientific papers reflect similar things with certain nutrients studied.

Can you link me the paper? I would still imagine that it begins to taper off at certain extremes of weight. Probably tied more closely to ideal body weight considering the gut is only so long. Obviously if there is a component of upregulation of transporters in the gut based on basal metabolic rate, that would make sense, but I'd still hazard a guess that the upper limit falls well below 10,000 calories a day.