Common Sense Health: How to kill yourself slowly with terrible complications

By Dr. Gifford-Jones and Diana Gifford-Jones on July 26, 2024.

This column should make every doctor, nutritionist, health care worker, and anyone else who is sane shake their heads. A Coney Island competition to devour the most hotdogs in ten minutes should be the shame of New York and the promoters who support it!

Why would people want to ruin their bodies by participating? Why did reporters covering the event celebrate instead of criticizing such an asinine act of self destruction? Barnan and Bailey were right. There is a sucker born every minute.

The winner was a 26-year-old man from Chicago who gulped down 58 hot dogs! After his bizarre triumph of winning, he was so upbeat that he described it as a “life changing” event. That’s for sure. He remarked that he was getting married. One wonders if it ever occurred to him, or his bride, that the damage he had just inflicted on his body would last a lifetime. It is hard to imagine a clearer signal that he makes poor life choices and is destined for an unhealthy future.

To succeed in eating so much in ten minutes, he had to subject his stomach to months of preparation. Like boxers who must train to build strength and endurance, to become the hot dog champion, the stomach must be conditioned. A normal person’s stomach cannot contain that much food. This competitor would have had to enlarge the stomach over many weeks of eating huge meals to be able to hold this amount of food shoved in so rapidly.

Was he unaware of the lasting effects on his health? Eating like that is a certain pathway to obesity, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and coronary attack. If he does not care about his own health, should he not care about the costs everyone else must bear when he needs treatment for these diseases?

What about women? They have always been the brighter sex. But what a let down when, even without high-powered testosterone, they too compete to swallow hot dogs on Coney Island. A Japanese woman ate 51 in 10 minutes! Even more disturbing, it was the 10th time she had won this prize!

This Coney Island contest has been a crowding pleasing feature since 1916. One man in the crowd wearing a hot dog costume summed up the event. He said, “We are highly competitive and disciplined.” One might say they are disciplined to self-destruction.

It would be better for humanity if this event were never seen on Coney Island or anywhere else. Not on television, in social media, or in the esteemed New York Times. The promoters are ignoring the medical damage they have created for participants. Among the medical concerns would be expanded stomachs that require more food to achieve a sense of fullness. Add chronic injury and inflammation to the esophagus, the food pipe to the stomach. Obesity has plentiful negative health consequences, among them the development of type 2 diabetes and its terrible complications such as blindness, amputation of legs, kidney failure, and heart disease.

Why does the competition continue? Sadly, Coney Island and promoters are undoubtedly making money. Traditions hold sentimental value. And there is an endless queue of foolish people keen to accept stupid challenges.

But yet again, health authorities are missing opportunities. They are determined to make it harder for people to access affordable health promoting products with copious regulation instead of putting an end this sort of senselessness.

We are victims of our own folly. As often warned, “If you keep going to hell you will eventually get there.”