The nutritional horrors of competitive eating

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Joey Chestnut chomped down a record 68 hot dogs, capturing his third straight July Fourth hot-dog eating contest at Coney Island, an annual showcase for flamboyant hot dogging contestants eager to show they really are what they eat.

via REIGNING CHAMP JOEY CHESTNUT WINS HOT DOG EATING CONTEST – New York Post.

I actually watched this on television.  Call it nuts, call it morbid fascination, but I just couldn’t tear myself away from the spectacle of a couple dozen people cramming hot dogs in their faces.  When Joey won by stuffing 68 hot dogs down his gullet, I wanted to vomit for him.  Doing some quick research, I determined that he had eaten over 20,00o calories, 1,278 grams of fat,  23,968 milligrams of salt, and unspeakable amounts of suspicious nitrogenous compounds and beef offals in ten minutes.

That got me to thinking about some of the other competitive eating contests and their associated nutritional horrors.  Below I’ve listed a sampling of competitive eating records from the International Federation of Competitive Eating’s website and offered a quick nutritional analysis.

Butter:  7 quarter-pound sticks salted butter in 5 minutes, Don Lerman

5,656 calories,  644 grams of fat

Cow Brains:  57 (17.7 pounds) in 15 minutes, Takeru Kobayashi

11,045 calories, 821 grams of fat, 240,790 milligrams of cholesterol.  That’s the cholesterol equivalent of 1,141 eggs.  I’m having chest pains just thinking about that.

Doughnuts:  49 glazed doughnuts in 8 minutes, Eric Booker

11,270 calories, 220.5 grams of fat

Ice Cream:  1 gallon, 9 ounces of vanilla ice cream in 12 minutes, Cookie Jarvis

4,932 calories, 271 grams of fat

The “winner”, by my calculations:

Mayonnaise:  4 32-ounce bowls of mayonnaise in 8 minutes, Oleg Zhornitskiy

23,040 calories, 2,560 grams of fat