AMA Condemns Competitive Eating

Posted By elissa on Jun 22, 2011 | 1 comment

Good for the AMA.

In addition to resolutions backing the individual mandate to purchase health insurance and to adopt a bill of rights for medical residents, delegates to the AMA’s annual meeting have approved a resolution recognizing “competitive speed eating as an unhealthy eating practice with potential adverse consequences.”

…The background information given to the AMA’s voting delegates said that speed eating “condones excessive consumption, junk food consumption and a waste of resources that could be used to fight hunger.” (That background info doesn’t become official policy and wasn’t voted upon.)

Admittedly, the medical evidence that competitive eating has “potential adverse consequences” is fairly thin. But even if competitive eaters are no more or less healthy than other folks, I’d still find the “sport” worthy of condemnation… for reasons that I noted 3 years ago:

“Eating contests have – of course – been around for ages as a form of entertainment, like at county fairs and such. But that you would actually have a formal organization, with “stars” and “fans” – and rankings and statistics and what not takes it to a whole new level of strangeness. As a culture, we’re already too obsessed with food, especially bad food…this is just one more manifestation of that. It’s one more degree of separation between food/eating and human health/nutrition…which isn’t psychologically healthy, either.”