Car­la Rauseo

ES­PN ad­ver­tis­ing Nathan's Fa­mous Fourth of Ju­ly In­ter­na­tion­al Hot Dog Eat­ing Con­test? It's quite an oxy­moron, ac­tu­al­ly. "Sure­ly," I thought to my­self af­ter see­ing the ad­ver­tise­ment, "a food eat­ing com­pe­ti­tion is not a sport, and there­fore why would ES­PN be pro­mot­ing it?"

This prompt­ed me to do a lit­tle re­search in­to food eat­ing com­pe­ti­tions. I was ex­treme­ly sur­prised at what I found.

Not on­ly do such events have mas­sive pop­u­lar­i­ty, with win­ners tak­ing home US$20,000, but there is an ac­tu­al world or­gan­i­sa­tion called the In­ter­na­tion­al Fed­er­a­tion of Com­pet­i­tive Eat­ing (IFOCE), that is the gov­ern­ing body of MLE, Ma­jor League Eat­ing (as in MLB or Ma­jor League Base­ball).

It is the as­so­ci­a­tion that "en­cour­ages com­mu­ni­ca­tion, co­op­er­a­tion and uni­for­mi­ty in the su­per­vi­sion and reg­u­la­tion of com­pet­i­tive eat­ing events."

From every­thing I have seen in my re­search, MLE is re­gard­ed as a sport. In fact, Wikipedia de­fines com­pet­i­tive eat­ing as "a sport in which par­tic­i­pants com­pete against each oth­er to con­sume large quan­ti­ties of food in a short time pe­ri­od."

But re­al­ly...a sport? Those who ar­gue in favour of this clas­si­fi­ca­tion for MLE rea­son that one must train and pre­pare just as one would do for any oth­er sport. Train­ing for MLE con­sists of in­creas­ing the elas­tic­i­ty of the stom­ach, which is usu­al­ly seen as the key to eat­ing suc­cess. Com­peti­tors usu­al­ly train by con­sum­ing large amounts of wa­ter over a short time. This stretch­es the stom­ach.

Oth­ers add low calo­rie foods to such tech­niques and some eaters chew large amounts of gum to in­crease their jaw strength. They al­so work on re­fin­ing their ac­tu­al eat­ing tech­niques.

I read about a com­peti­tor who prac­ticed his tech­nique of com­press­ing hot dogs down in­to the small­est size pos­si­ble be­fore eat­ing them in a par­tic­u­lar man­ner, then jump­ing around to en­cour­age the food to set­tle in his stom­ach af­ter swal­low­ing.

These com­peti­tors al­so un­der­go per­son­al time tri­als with the con­test food in or­der to im­prove their times.

Does such "train­ing" mer­it clas­si­fi­ca­tion as a sport? Ask­ing this ques­tion begs an ex­plo­ration of the de­f­i­n­i­tion of "sport."

Wikipedia de­fines sport as "the ex­er­cise of skill in a phys­i­cal ac­tiv­i­ty which is of­ten com­pet­i­tive and car­ried on for its in­trin­sic en­joy­ment, in­clud­ing that of its spec­ta­tors.

It is gen­er­al­ly recog­nised as ac­tiv­i­ties based on phys­i­cal ath­leti­cism or phys­i­cal dex­ter­i­ty, gov­erned by the use of rules."

I sup­pose that if we strict­ly ad­here to the above de­f­i­n­i­tion, we can say that com­pet­i­tive eat­ing is some­what a sport. It does have an el­e­ment of com­pe­ti­tion, rules, and a lev­el of en­joy­ment for the fans, and I sup­pose in some sick way (no pun in­tend­ed), for the com­peti­tor him­self.

One can even stretch the de­f­i­n­i­tion of phys­i­cal ac­tiv­i­ty and ar­gue that the process of eat­ing is phys­i­cal and that an ac­tu­al phys­i­cal ex­pan­sion must oc­cur in the stom­ach.

But sport is much more than Wikipedia's de­f­i­n­i­tion. Those in favour of clas­si­fy­ing MLE as a sport have a hard bat­tle to win.

Sport should not af­fect one's health, and com­pet­i­tive eat­ing can be dan­ger­ous. A study in 2007 by the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia School of Med­i­cine re­port­ed on the ob­ser­va­tion of com­pet­i­tive eater, Tim Janus. He ate 36 hot dogs in 10 min­utes be­fore doc­tors in­ter­vened.

They found that Janus's stom­ach did not have nor­mal mus­cle con­trac­tions that push food to the di­ges­tive tract.

This stom­ach paral­y­sis, called gas­tro­pare­sis, is a con­cern among those who stretch their stom­achs be­yond their ca­pac­i­ty. This can cause chron­ic in­di­ges­tion, nau­sea and vom­it­ing.

Oth­er con­cerns in­clude ul­cers and stom­ach per­fo­ra­tions from binge eat­ing and a con­di­tion known as wa­ter in­tox­i­ca­tion, which re­sults from drink­ing large amounts of wa­ter, di­lut­ing elec­trolytes in the blood.

Car­la Rauseo, DPT, CSCS is a Doc­tor of Phys­i­cal Ther­a­py and Cer­ti­fied Strength and Con­di­tion­ing Spe­cial­ist at To­tal Re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion Cen­tre Lim­it­ed in El So­cor­ro.