If you think you’re eating meat when you have a hot dog, I’m sorry to tell you that you’ve been getting played. We all have.

What’s actually in them, then? “They’re just tubes of fat,” Tyler Rouse, a pathologist at the Stratford General Hospital in Ontario, Canada, explained to Scientific American.

Rouse got curious as to what exactly where in dogless hot dogs a couple years ago and realized that he had the ability to figure it 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.” He recounted how he figured it out to the publication.

So he and his colleague Jordan Radigan got their hands on three types of dogs: a no-name brand from the supermarket, another all-beef 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 found, to their surprise, […]