Competitive eating: Are winners born or made?
As the sport grows in popularity, researchers are studying the physiology. Doctors worry that extreme eaters may be endangering their health.
At 6-foot-3 and 213 pounds, Crazy Legs Conti stays in shape with jogging (he's run two marathons) and six to eight small, healthful meals a day, heavy on the protein. Most days.
And then there are days when he binges big-time, like the Sunday a few weeks ago when he scarfed a bushel of Florida sweet corn in no time flat.
This was not self-indulgence. It was self-disciplined preparation for the April 27 National Sweet Corn Eating Championship in Palm Beach, Fla., where Conti hoped to defend the title he won a year ago after downing 34.75 ears of corn in 12 minutes. (He came in third.) His practice session, he says, was "to figure out the best way to eat one ear and then extrapolate."
Competitive eating, a pastime once considered small potatoes on the entertainment circuit, is now staking its claim as a grade-A sport. Last summer, the field's signature event, Nathan's Famous 4th of July Hot Dog Eating Contest, drew a crowd of nearly 50,000 and was shown live on ESPN.
The sport's rising status has some doctors shaking their heads: Such behavior could potentially cause medical problems, they say, such as an esophageal tear or flaccid stomachs. No such mishaps have yet been reported.
Researchers, meanwhile, have begun to study the sport a bit, which may help answer a question that must have popped into more than one spectator's head: Are extreme-eating champs born or made?
Conti is one of a cast of colorful "gurgitators" -- he faces off against fan favorites such as Eater X, who cultivates a "man of mystery" image, Sonya "Black Widow" Thomas, who says she's out to devour her male competition, and the original food-funneling phenom, Takeru "The Tsunami" Kobayashi of Japan, who won at the Nathan's Famous eat-off for six years straight before losing in 2007 (while eating injured) to Joey "Jaws" Chestnut.
The ability to cram down 66 hot dogs and buns in 12 minutes, as Chestnut did, doesn't fall to everyone.
In a study of competitive eating published last year in the American Journal of Roentgenology, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine compared Major League eater Tim Janus (Eater X) with another male who was a hearty eater. They were both told to eat as many hot dogs as they could in 12 minutes. Before the test, they were given a dose of high-density barium, and the researchers used fluoroscopy to observe their stomachs.
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