"gluttony" news and stories

One of my favorite early Saturday Night Live skits was featured John Belushi as an Olympic athlete. The scene opens with clips of Belushi doing a high jump and running around a track, then cuts to a shot of him at the breakfast table. Clutching a cigarette, Belushi looks into the camera with complete gravitas and tells about his secret to staying fit: "I downed a lot of donuts. Little chocolate donuts. They taste good and they've got the sugar I need to get me going in the morning."

The commercial played off the classic "Wheaties" ads, which featured Bruce Jenner. The prevailing wisdom in those days stated that top-class athletes had to eat extremely healthy foods, like whole grain cereal and skinless, boneless chicken. However, as I recently read about Michael Phelps' daily eating regimen, I was surprised to see that his diet is much closer to John Belushi's than to Richard Simmons. To begin with, the Olympian consumes approximately 12,000 calories a day, roughly six times the RDA for a man his age. Second, it is heavily skewed towards carbohydrates and fats, which most diets eschew. Given Phelps' amazing energy expenditure (in the average week, the guy swims five hours a day, six days a week!

At any rate, Phelps' average daily menu is after the jump...

In Japan, one of the hottest stars in competitive eating is Natsuko "Gal" Sone, a cute, bubbly young woman that is known almost as well for her unusual makeup (which includes white eyeliner) as she is for her eating skils. Her nickname comes from her style of dressing in the gyaru or "gal" fashion, with dyed blonde hair. She is one of the relatively few female competitive eaters and seems to be the highest ranked one at the moment, with victories in contests involving seafood, curry and hamburgers, among other things, and for participating in a number of regular eating contests on Japanese TV. Her eating quirk is that she actually seems to be a very picky eater and takes her own container of mayonnaise, her favorite condiment, along when she eats to put on just about everything.

In the clip after the jump, you can see a Japanese television show follow her throughout the day as she consumed 40,000 calories. If, like me, you don't speak Japanese, you'll find the popups on the show very helpful, as they show the measurements (weights, etc) of the foods that she eats and keep track of the calorie count.

[Thanks, Mark]

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