Philadelphia Magazine writer Jason Fagone spent one year profiling some of the most divinely outsized personalities in the world of competitive eating. While Akron house painter Coondog O'Karma makes a midlife grab at glory via rapid-fire pizza consumption, Bill "El Wingador" Simmons attempts to reclaim Wong Bowl supremacy from 90lb Sonya "Black Widow" Thomas, and day trader Tim Janus dons the mantle of the mysterious Eater X, it all comes down to one shared hunger. They all want to win the Mustard Yellow Belt of International Hot Dog Eating Supremacy back from the Japanese who'd dominated the Nathan's Famous Fourth of July International Hot Dog-Eating Contest nearly every year since 1997.

Back in July of 2001, that would mean beating the record of 25 1/8 set the previous year by Kazutoyo "The Rabbit" Arai.

That was before Takeru Kobayashi's 50 Dog Day.

Read an excerpt from Jason Fagone's Horsemen of the Esophagus on AOL Food

Here at Slashfood burgers have been on our foodar since May. Heck, now that we're into summer they're on everybody's mind, including the good citizens of Akron, Ohio, who hosted the National Hamburger Festival this past weekend.

The hefty hamburger above was cooked up this weekend, but not in Akron. Weighing in at 10 pounds, Big Bad Bubba's Double Wide hails from Huntington, W. Va. Specifically Hillbilly Hotdogs, which last year created a 5-pound burger known as, you guessed it, Big Bad Bubba's Single Wide.

This weekend HH added the BBDW to its menu. This massive sandwich may sport a 6.5-pound patty, but it's still less than one-sixth the weight of the largest burger I've ever heard of. Either way, I'd love to see Kobayashi take one down, if only so he could declare himself a big bad bubba, even if he is only half-wide.

Who says there are no injuries in the world of competitive eating?

Sure, they might not have to deal with torn cartilege or a twisted ankle or a blown out knee, but what about jaw injuries? Takeru Kobayashi, the king of the annual Nathan's Famous July Fourth International Hot Dog Eating Contest, has arthritis of the jaw. He can't even open his mouth more than the size of a fingertip, but he's still going to enter the competition this year. Last year he ate a little over 53 hot dogs in 12 minutes.

Kobayashi isn't limited to hot dogs either. He once ate 97 hamburgers in eight minutes. The hell?

In the Krystal Square Off III World Hamburger Eating Contest in Chattanooga, Tennessee this past weekend, Takeru Kobayashi brought home another championship title by eating 97 hamburgers in 8 minutes. Joey Chestnut came in second, finishing with 91 hamburgers, followed by Patrick Bertoletti in third with 76. All the numbers are up hugely from last year's contest, in which Kobayashi narrowly beat Chestnut with a final total of 67-62 burgers. One other big change from previous years was that the contest was televised on ESPN2, which gives the sport a much wider audience and much more publicity than it enjoyed before.

The contest is known as the "square off" because the burgers that the competitors wolf down are square, but Krystal's burgers hosts the contest because they have been holding eating contests at their stores since the first one opened in 1932. According to company legend, the tradition was set when the second customer challenged the first customer to a head-to-head hamburger showdown.

It's something of a mystery as to where the FOX network gets some of their programming ideas, so the original inspiration for this particular segment is anyone's guess. Since Takeru Kobayshi can out-eat just about anybody, FOX decided to have him face off against a Kodiak bear - an 8-ft tall, 1000-lb animal - in a hot dog eating competition.

The clip is pretty funny, actually. The announcers treat it almost like a wrestling match and the best line is when they start to talk about the bear's technique vs. Kobayashi's. "[The bear] has a very different approach to eating. See, he looks away and he takes a break. He doesn't know it's a competition. He's just a natural eating machine." For his part, Kobayashi definitely knew it was a competition and didn't take his eyes off the bear.

Who emerged victorious? You'll have to watch the clip to find out, but I will say that someone is already eagerly awaiting a rematch.

It is extremely unlikely that you could out-eat world champion competitive eater Takeru Kobayashi, but what if you had three friends on your team? As it turns out, 4:1 are not good enough odds to take on the champ. In the World Lobster Roll Eating Challenge in Boston, a team of four young Massachusetts residents (about 19 years old or so) tried, collectively, to eat more than Kobayashi. Even with $10,000 prize money as an incentive, the four could only put away 25 rolls to Kobayashi's 41.Kobayashi, who has been called the Lance Armstrong of the competitive eating world, took home the prize money instead of the local team.

As with many things that Kobayashi eats, this number is the new world record for lobster-roll eating. He only tasted his first lobster roll the night before the competition and said that he thought he could beat his record in the future, now that he was more familiar with the food.

Already the master of hot dog eating, competitive eating superstar Takeru Kobayashi set a new world record with a different kind of sausage: bratwurst. He ate 58 bratwursts in 10 minutes, smashing the previous record of only 34 1/2 brats. He said that he really liked the brats, but they were a little harder to eat than hot dogs are, most likely this is because the dogs are eaten with buns, while the brats involve more chewing. Joey Chestnut, considered to be one of the up and coming stars of the sport, came in second with only 45 brats. The IFCOE has a breakdown of the prize money from the contest, revealing that Kobayashi took home $8,000 for his work.

And for anyone who's counting, the 160-lb Kobayashi ingested 16,820 calories, 1,450 grams of fat, along with 19 days' worth of the recommended (minimum) daily amount of sodium.

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]