Meet Takeru Kobayashi - The Professional Eater

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Champion hot dog eater Takeru Kobayashi by CherriiPOP

I love eating food, trying out different cuisines like Korean, Japanese. Many people love eating. Imagine eating for a profession. Well Takeru Kobayashi is a competitive eater and he eats for a living – pretty cool right? He is quite famous, and I’m sure you guys have seen footage of him eating on the news or on youtube before.

Let me give you a bit of a background about him. He holds a number of Guinness Records for eating. He held the world record for hot dog eating for 6 years. His achievements for eating are mind blowing. I’m going to run through them now
- 50 hot dogs in 12 minutes (4.2 hot dogs/minute)
- 83 dumplings in 8 minutes (10.3 dumplings/minute)
- 100 roast pork buns in 12 minutes (8.33 buns/minute)
- 17.7 pounds of cow brains in 15 minutes (1.18 pounds/minute)
- 20 pounds of rice balls in 30 minutes (0.67 pounds/minute)

Here is a video of him in action. This is Kobayashi VS Bear. Unbelievable!


It takes me 6 minutes to eat 1 hot dog, 2 minutes to eat 1 dumpling. It’s hard to believe that eating he is eating so much in a short amount of time.

You would assume Kobayashi was a large man, but actually he is a medium build man. I don’t know where he puts all the food!

There are a lot of techniques and training required for speed eating. One of the techniques is avoid chewing your food, this is time consuming. You should just scoff everything down; like how snakes engulf their food in one go.

In preparation for a competition, Kobayashi stretches his stomach by eating larger and larger amounts of food. Then he exercise to ensure that fat does not hamper the expansion of his stomach. His trademark for speed eating is the ‘Kobyashi shake’, where he wiggles his body to force food down his esophagus and ensure food is compact in his stomach.

When eating hot dogs, he splits the Frankfurt in half and then dips the buns in water or sprite before forcing it down.
The famous Nathan’s hot dog eating contest is now coming to China on June 18. Kobayashi will be competing. The competition is open to public, to be eligible you need to be 18+ Chinese national with a valid passport, enter before May 31st at the Nathan's Famous website