This is

is Scientific American 60 Second Science.

I'm Christopher Intagata.

If you find yourself at a cookout this 4th of July,

gazing at the hot dogs, wondering,

what exactly are they? here's your answer.

They're just tubes of fat.

Tyler Rouse pathologist at the Stratford General Hospital in Ontario Canada

and I may as well give a spoiler alert before continuing this story because...

I've ruined hot dogs for many people.

A couple years back, Rouse too was wondering about the composition of Franks, given his day job...

I said, well, you know, that's actually an easy answer to find out.

We work in a lab. We make slides all day.

Hot dogs are kind of the perfect shape to make into a slide, we can actually answer this question.

So he and his colleague Jordan Radigan got their hands on three types of dogs, a no-name brand

from the supermarket, another all-beaf dog, and a third from a ballpark vendor.

They then took cross sections for slides and used stains to identify different types of tissue.

And they found to their surprise that most slices consisted primarily of fat globules with very little skeletal muscle,

the stuff we tend to think of as meat.

In fact, the no name brand actually had more skeletal muscle than the all beef brand. The researchers also found bits of bone and

blood vessels and cartilage, even plant material. How did vegetable matter get in there?

Let me put it this way.

...