A masters student at UC Berkeley, Mike Wooldridge, started thinking about the relatively young "sport" of competitive eating and noticed that there were many records, but no way to compare performance results across food groups. He set out to see if he could normalize, or standardize, the results from all types of eating contests and make it possible to compare the performance of the eaters across different foods.
Mike analyzed 23 records and converted them into a rate of ingestion (ROI), resulting in a kilograms per minute value for every food.
The blue bars are the average ROI of given foods (easier foods have higher bars) and the yellow bars are the eaters' records. The big spikes are some of world champion eater Takeru Kobayashi's records, but you can see that, because the rest of the yellow bars are approximately equal, the eaters mostly perform up to the same standards, despite the food involved in the challenge.
[via Trencherwomen]
6-27-2006 @9:30PM zhonghuarising said... I can't believe someone actually studied this! I have to say that watching competitive eating contests is kind of fascinating in a strange/gross/I-can't-believe-they're-doing-that way. That kind of thing used to be on TV all the time when I lived in Japan. Not so much anymore though, I hear.
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