2007-08-07, Speed Eating Champion 速食大赛（在线收听）

Eat slowly, chew your food thoroughly, eat with a fork. These table manners don’t apply in the world of competitive eating, or sometimes called speed eating. The goal here--eat as much as you can in a short period of time.

Ladies and gentlemen, so it is, and so it shall be, let the waffle house, waffle world, waffle eating championship begin!

If you think the bigger the man, the more he can eat, then think again.

I have about 28 world records, you know, on different kind of food. Most / part of my record was 552 Louisiana Acme oysters, 65 hard-boiled eggs, in a six-minute-forty-second. 11-pound of cheesecakes, 44 lobster, lobsters in ten-minute.

Sonya Thomas, one of the top speed eaters in the world, weighs just 105 pounds. Her nickname is Black Widow.

So this eating competition is almost by 99%, is male competitor. And I am the female competitor, and I wanna beat them, I wanna kill them, I wanna kill them, in, in eating, you know.

Sonya is a fierce competitor and I think she really likes to put men in their place. Um, I think she gets a little bit of a kick out of that. As Frenchness, she is so small, looks as if she couldn’t finish a tin of cottage cheese. And the guys next to her usually were so large that looked like they had their own eco-system. And yet she could beat them.

Sonya claimed she can eat 18 pounds of food in one sitting. How can a 105-pound woman eat almost one sixth of her body weight?

Over time, the stomach progressively becomes more and more dilated, that this is an acquired adaptation that resulted from endless training, discipline and will power.

However she does it, Black Widow often beats men at least twice her size. The intense competition regularly draws hundreds of spectators. This attention on gorging mass quantities of food worries dietitians like Mariana Lopez.

From a health perspective, it’s important that they are doing things like having a cholesterol checked and taking it out of stance in their health commitments. My concern from a nutrition perspective is that speed eating or competitive eating kind of glamorizes the notion of over-consumption of food.

Glamorous or not, it’s unlikely we’ll be seeing Sonya in the Olympics any time soon.

I always dreamed one day that we would be in the Olympics, and my hopes were dashed on that the IOC president Jacques Rogge, has been, you know, dismissive at best, and refuses to return any of our phone calls. You know, I’ve moved on.