By all accounts, America is in the midst of an obesity epidemic. “According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 34 percent of adults aged 20 and older are obese, and 34 percent are overweight. Among children, 18 percent of teens aged 12 to 19 are obese, 20 percent of children aged 6 to 11 are obese, as are 10 percent of kids aged 2 to 5.” Not only are we increasingly living large but we also are often failing to recognize the extent of our porkiness. A recent Harris Interactive/HealthDay poll found that “many Americans have skewed perceptions when it comes to their weight, often believing they are thinner than they really are, even when the scales are shouting otherwise…Thirty percent of those in the “overweight” class believed they were actually normal size, while 70 percent of those classified as obese felt they were simply overweight.” This is a serious public health issue.
Inexplicably, as obesity rates have climbed, so has the popularity of competitive eating. Yesterday, in Sparks, Nevada, a rib-eating contest was held. Here, in part, is what the Reno Gazette Journal had to say about this event:
America’s No. 1 professional eater, Joey Chestnut, regained his crown at the Best in the West Nugget Rib Cook-off’s eating competition Wednesday evening by eating 8 pounds of pork ribs in 12 minutes.
In 2008, Chestnut won the competition in Sparks, the International Federation of Competitive Eating’s most prestigious rib event and set a world record when he ate 9.8 pounds in the same duration. Pat Bertoletti of Chicago, who finished second this year with 6.9 pounds, temporarily unseated Chestnut last year.
Chestnut’s win is his fourth in five years in the Nugget’s competition. The 26-year-old engineering student from San Jose, Calif., did not eat for two days before the competition to clear his stomach. Afterward, he said he plans to drink liquids to ‘keep the perfect balance of emptiness but also be hydrated and have the right amount of nutrition to digest a ridiculous amount of food.’ [full article]
Really, I don’t know where to start (besides stifling the urge to gag). I’m not sure which is more obscene, consuming such a large quantity of food in such a short time or staging such competitions when we’re bursting with obesity. None of this seems healthy to me. I cannot even begin to imagine what it would be like to down (and keep from coming up) so much food. But, hey, kudos to the wonderfully-named Joey Chestnut, who holds a number of world records for his endeavors in the field of competitive eating. According to Wikipedia, this includes consuming 68 hot dog and buns in 10 minutes during the Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest in Coney Island, Brooklyn, NY, and 8.6 pounds of tempura-fried asparagus at the World Deep Fried Asparagus Eating Championship in Stockton, CA.
We live in a very strange world. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to quell my growing nausea and lay down.
Kmareka.com 
The NYT says that recruits to our ‘volunteer army’ are often unable to meet the physical standards. I think that our diet is calorie rich and nutrition poor, and we are being starved of activity and ‘down time’ for our bodies and minds to renew.
I don’t know why,but most of the “champion”(gag)eaters aren’t overweight.
I think the prevalence of processed foods in our diets contribute to illness-when I was growing up,we never had that stuff,and many of the older people in my family who were overweight lived to very old ages with no heart disease or only an onset in the mid to late 80’s which is kind of expected.