Yesterday morning while looking through the mail, my roommate and I came across a flyer for a new sushi restaurant. Posted in bold print on the front was an advertisement for a food eating contest. The point of the contest was to finish an entire extremely spicy sushi roll within an hour, and your meal would be free. As big fans of spicy food, we started talking and said, “We can do this. How spicy can wasabi and Siracha be?”Being poor college students, we jumped at the chance of getting a free meal, because let’s face it, the struggle is real for us right now. Since we’re both Mexican and we live in Arizona, we’ve had experience with heat. Or so we thought.
We psyched ourselves up for the challenge and headed out to the restaurant. I chickened out last minute and opted for your basic wonton soup and a couple rolls, but my roommate (a little spitfire, might I add), was more than ready to take on the challenge. We asked the woman who seated us about the challenge and her exact words were, “It’s very, very, very, very, very spicy.” She still didn’t buy it. Then the chef came and told us the same thing and that most people don’t make it to the third piece, but she followed through anyway. We should’ve known this was a serious sushi roll from the moment we tried the sauce that the roll would be topped with and teared up at how spicy it was. We also should’ve backed out when the man told us that people have been taken to the emergency room right after attempting the challenge. But we especially should’ve opted out when he made her sign a waiver.
So, she gets the roll. It’s beautifully placed on a long platter, all for her. Its heat also radiated across the restaurant and probably burned a few nose hairs out of my nose. Eager to start, she puts an entire piece in her mouth. Immediately, the look on her face lets us know that she’s not going to make it to the end. She then started crying, ate half of another piece before stopping and could not get the heat out of her mouth for the rest of the meal. She tried eating a couple California rolls to hopefully settle the heat a little bit, but it didn’t help. She was miserable for the rest of the meal and couldn’t eat anything else for the remainder of our time there. When we got home, she immediately puked because her stomach hurt so badly. She said it was a horrible experience and that she would never try that again.
Although a lot of food-eating contests focus on eating an insane amount of food and not really on how spicy a food is, it got me thinking about how safe any of these contests actually are.
Some people dedicate a solid chunk of their lives to prepare for one of these contests. So what’s the appeal? Just the same thing that appealed to me and my roommate: a prize. Many bigger competitions have bigger prizes of course, but our human nature eggs us on to compete. Eating seems like no big deal, we do it every day, right? But when mass quantities of food are consumed in such a short time slot, things start to get weird within our bodies.
The main concern that doctors have with food competitions is that training involved for these things leads people to think they are getting adequate nutrition by overeating different kinds of foods. This, indeed, is not true, since overeating leads to weight gain as well as many other medical problems. Binge eating like this is also very dangerous, since it could cause stomach perforations in people with undiagnosed ulcers.
Some competitors might vomit regularly in order to prepare themselves. Frequent vomiting increases the chances of aspiration or food getting into the lungs, which can lead to a deadly pneumonia. Although this is rare in food competitors, it is not unheard of.
Despite the spectacle, one can’t help but wonder how a competitive food eater doesn’t throw up after shoving 10 hot dogs in his mouth in 5 minutes. In normal individuals, the stomach sends a message to the vagus in the brain, which then sends a signal to the stomach to contract and send food to the small intestine. Food competitors block this out which allows their stomach to stretch to an abnormal size. Upon completing the challenge, there seems to be no complication with the digestive system. However, if the stomach muscles are being constanly over-stretched, the individual may develop gastroparesis (stomach paralysis), which is most commonly seen in diabetics. This can cause nausea, vomiting and chronic indigestion.
While all of the side effects from binge eating may have a sudden effect on the body, there have been no reported complications from competitive eating and only one case of a jaw fracture.
So the next time you want to try one of these food eating competitions, think twice about the effects it could have on your body as an untrained extreme food-eater. As for my roommate, it doesn’t look like she’s going to try another one of these in-restaurant competitions any time soon, unless, according to her, it’s something acheivable like eating gallons on gallons of ice cream.