It’s 25cm long and a trained stomach is capable of holding up to 4 litres of food. When the stomach is empty it contains about 1 litre of liquid.

So Paul Newman’s 3 litres of eggs should just about fit into a very large stomach. But most people’s stomachs could not hold this much.

Once full, the stomach’s nerves sense that it has become stretched and its muscles begin to work so that the food and enzymes mix together.

The gastric gland secretes pepsin, an enzyme that breaks down protein, and hydrochloric acid which kills bacteria.The gastric gland also secretes mucus that protects the walls of the stomach from the acid.

Once broken down the food is a semi-fluid mass which enters the small intestine, and it is here that most of the digestion takes place. At this stage, only the protein has begun to be digested.

Only small amounts of food are released into the 6.5m long small intestine at a time. This means that most of the eggs will remain in the stomach for longer than three and a half hours.

Here, enzymes from the pancreas break down the sugars, fats and the proteins that were not tackled in the stomach.