Love them or hate them, there's a good chance you feel pretty strongly about competitive
eating contests. But there's a dark side to these eating contests, and it gets even more
disturbing than you might be expecting. Here's some truth behind competitive eating contests.
There has been a lot of research done into some sports, but when it comes to competitive
eating and food contests, there haven't been many studies done on what it does to a person's
body.
A report published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal looked at just how little
is known about what competitive eaters are actually doing to their bodies, and University
of Pennsylvania professor of medicine Dr. David Metz had this to say -
"The bottom line is, there is such minimal data that we are doing a lot of conjecture.
[...] My concern is if they do this for years and years, this long-term chronic overeating
may lead to some kind of muscular dysfunction."
Even professional eaters acknowledge it's probably not a good idea in the long run.
Peter Czerwinski or Furious Pete as he's more well known, has said -
"I think it's stupid for anyone to do, to be frank, though I'm having fun with it."
And they're not just talking about competing, they're talking about the training sessions
that lead up to it. Different eaters train in different ways, and repeat champion eater
Matt Stonie told USA Today that there are no real guidelines in place.
"A lot of us don't know what we're doing. We're just experimenting. Sometimes people
go a little gung-ho, a little overboard, and hurt themselves."
While long-term risks might be a little uncertain, immediate dangers often become very apparent
very quickly. If you're thinking that choking might be a real danger during food eating
contests, you're right.
According to a report published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, choking is one
of the biggest risks faced by anyone who enters any kind of eating contest.
Even competitive eater Randy Santel says choking is a very real danger, especially for amateurs
who aren't familiar with the mechanisms. They say taking large bites is a rookie mistake,
and the key is small bites you can swallow without chewing... or dying.
It might seem like an eating contest organized by your school or town, for fundraising or
fun, would be pretty harmless. However, Boston.com says there have been a lot of deaths reported
at these sorts of events.
The incidents are tragic. Vice reported on the deaths of two people in a single weekend
in 2017: one college student died during a pancake-eating contest, and another choked
and died during a donut-eating challenge. One Australian man had a heart attack during
a chili pie eating contest in 2013, the same year another man choked to death during a
Romanian sausage-eating contest. No one there knew how to do the Heimlich maneuver.
Unfortunately the list continues with tragic food deaths, and it seems like it's going
to keep continuing: in 2019, CNN reported that a man had died during a taco-eating contest
held at a California baseball game.
For those that make the jump from amateur to professional, it's not just about the occasional
day of stuffing yourself silly. Matt Stonie told USA Today that training sessions are
absolutely essential for anyone who wants to win, but they can be ridiculously dangerous.
Stonie prepped for Nathan's Famous hot dog eating challenge by eating around 60 hot dogs
in a single session, three times a week, for the six weeks prior to the competition. He
followed these binge sessions up by, he says,
"Drinking as much water I can afterwards till, bluntly put, I feel like I'm going to explode."
And that's just not smart. Healthline says that while there are no firm guidelines for
the amount of water than can be deadly, they say drinking more than 3 to 4 liters over
the course of a few hours can definitely kill.
Patrick Bertoletti said as much to the AV Club, too. When they asked him about his training
methods, he admitted that one of his go-to methods when he was competing was to drink
an unsafe amount of liquid incredibly fast, and he added:
"I would actually suggest that no one try this kind of competitive eating or try any
of this training, because it can be very dangerous and stupid."
For the record, the organizers of Nathan's Famous hot dog eating contest have denounced
this sort of reckless training regimen.
Competitive eating and the training associated with it aren’t just potentially deadly,
some of the biggest names in the industry have badly hurt themselves. When Patrick Bertoletti
was asked about injuries, he admitted that he had hurt himself but refused to talk about
just what he'd done, saying -
"I don't want to hurt the sport, I don't want to hurt my marketability, and I'm embarrassed."
Others have been a little more open about what they've done. In 2007, long-time Nathan's
Famous champ Takeru Kobayashi posted that he had developed such bad arthritis in his
jaw that he could no longer open his mouth. He was 29 years old at the time.
Also in 2007, Don "Moses" Lerman very openly said that he had stretched his stomach so
far it had caused internal bleeding. But he was far from upset about it, saying -
"I do it for the thrill of the competition. Some people are good at golf. I'm good at
eating."
It's no wonder that according to Forbes, any event held by Major League Eating requires
emergency medical personnel to be on hand during the events. There's no telling what
can happen. Take Moon-Pie eating champ Mort Hurst. In 1991, he had a stroke after he spent
29 seconds eating 38 soft-boiled eggs. Perhaps even more surprisingly, he not only recovered,
but returned to the sport and kept on eating.
"I felt like I could've done better today, I train hard… I just, I ran outta ketchup
and that messed me up."
Patrick Bertoletti is skeptical of any long-term effects, but medical experts aren't so sure.
There are things like obesity and diabetes, of course, but there's also much worse. Doctors
from the University of Pennsylvania have published the results of a study that found that all
the training they put themselves through doesn't just expand their stomach, it allows them
to override the satiety reflex. That's the thing that tells you when you're full, makes
you want to stop eating, and triggers the vomiting reflex if you've eaten too much.
They also showed a lack of "gastric peristalsis," which is the movement of the muscles in your
digestive tract that help move food along and digest it.
"Looking back I could always eat double what my brother could eat. I don't have that thing
in me that says 'stop eating, you're full.'"
What does that mean for a competitive eater who does it for years? No one's sure, but
according to research published in the American Journal of Roentgenology, it's entirely possible
they'll suffer lifelong consequences like uncontrollable nausea, vomiting, and even
gastroparesis, which is a condition where the stomach can't empty itself.
If the likely complications from years of competitive eating sound bad, the fixes are
potentially worse. According to Forbes, all that stomach-stretching they're doing is putting
a serious strain on their digestive tract, and a stomach stretched that much is at a
high risk of twisting around itself. Chronic problems might necessitate a partial gastrectomy,
which is the surgical removal of part of the stomach.
The Cleveland Clinic says gastroparesis is sometimes treated with medication and sometimes
with surgery. An electrical device is implanted, and shocks are sent into the stomach muscles
to control vomiting and the flow of food through the system. Other patients might need a feeding
tube to be inserted, or a person might be forced to rely on what's essentially an IV
drip to deliver crucial nutrients directly into the bloodstream, bypassing the stomach
entirely.
According to the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa, somewhere around 30 million people
in the U.S. alone suffer from some kind of eating disorder — and someone dies from
one of these disorders every 62 minutes. It's a huge problem, and Psychology Today questioned
whether eating contests were a type of quote -
"socially sanctioned bulimia".
And they're not the only ones to draw the comparison. Patrick Bertoletti told the AV
Club -
"It's like controlled bulimia. It's bulimia where you get paid for it. It's me trading
on an eating disorder for money."
When Men's Health talked to competitive eater Erik Lamkin, he had a different story to tell.
When he was 17 years old, he was hospitalized for anorexia nervosa. When he got out of treatment,
he said he knew he had to face his problems head-on, and went to Man v. Food alumni restaurant
the Broken Yolk, ordered a 12-egg omelet, and never looked back.
By the time he was 25, he had turned eating challenges into a positive experience with
food, and it just goes to show that everyone approaches it differently.
Hunger is still a major problem, and Feeding America estimates that 40 million Americans
go hungry. To put that in perspective, if you took the entire populations of New York
City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, and Philadelphia, you're only at about 20
million.
That's unthinkable, and when you look at the numbers, it's completely understandable that
there's a lot of people who point out just how wasteful these food eating contests are.
Others point to eating contests as a symbol of a bigger problem: America's wasteful nature.
How do competitive eaters justify it? According to Randy Santel, it's not wasteful because
he's capable of eating the leftovers of everyone else at the table. But... is that really the
point critics are trying to make?
Food eating contests are all about the spectacle -
"This is the only heavyweight bout that matters in the world today!"
– and if you want to get recognized, you're going to have to keep going bigger and more
outlandish. But some critics say they've gone too far — especially when it crosses the
line into animal cruelty.
In 2007, Esquire says Six Flags held an eating contest that was more about the yuck factor
than speed or quantity, and anyone who could eat a live cockroach was given VIP passes
for rides during their Fright Fest Halloween celebration. PETA got involved, and Six Flags
issued a response that gets more disturbing the more you think about it: they said cockroaches
weren't any different from any of the other animals they serve. Ew. Other events also
walk the fine line between food contests and Fear Factor challenges.
So, here's a question: how much do you think you'll need to shove into your head to become
a competitive eater? The numbers are mind-numbing, and we'll start with what Erik Lamkin told
Men's Health: he once ate 100,000 calories in four days. For a normal person, that's
enough food to last 50 days. That was extreme, though, and he more regularly sticks to 20,000
and 25,000-calorie challenges for ordinary days.
Here are some other numbers: Matt Stonie once downed 13,000 calories and 534 grams of fat
to take on a Dunkin' Donuts challenge, and the whopper of a winner? Joey Chestnut ate
75 hot dogs to break the Nathan's Famous record in 2020. That's 38 days' worth of sodium,
and roughly 26 days' worth of fat. There is no way that's good for anyone.
If you're wondering whether or not there's a better way to win a food eating contest
than training with thousands of calories and gallons of liquid... well, you'll have to
define "better."
Since professional competitive eaters rely on changing their physiology to allow for
enough room to pack in all that food, appetite-enhancing substances aren't going to help too much.
But there are a few things that could, in theory, give an eater the upper hand.
Some Quora users give incredibly questionable advice, including one person who admits to
having used insulin to lower his blood sugar and, in turn, increase his appetite before
an eating contest he won. While he says that's just for a small contest among a group of
friends, Dr. Connor O'Brien of Stanford told Thrillist that there are medications that
are used to give contestants an advantage by helping to override nausea, and others
act to suppress the nervous system's reaction to overeating. Does any of that sound healthy?
Not in the least.
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