Chinese man gobbles 160 eggs to mark Christmas

Beijing: A Chinese competitive eater who marked the Christmas season by consuming 160 eggs in one sitting said today he was in good health and planned more extreme stunts.

Pan Yizhong, 46, sported a red and white Santa hat as he gobbled 150 quail eggs and 10 chicken eggs in less than 40 minutes yesterday to promote a restaurant in central China's Hunan province.

The Chinese word for Christmas -- Shengdanjie – contains a character which is a homophone for "egg," and Pan said it "seemed like an appropriate time to eat eggs." Quail eggs are significantly smaller than chickens' eggs, and pictures showed him shoving several into his mouth simultaneously.

"At the time I got to 160, I was becoming tired of the flavour so I stopped. It wasn't because I was full," he told AFP. Pan, the most celebrated exponent of the art of competitive eating in China, has previously dispatched 147 dumplings in a single sitting and once polished off 40 bowls of noodles in 15 minutes.

"Now I'm back to normal, I've had ice cream and barbequed meat since," Pan said. "As a competitive eater, I want to test my limits eating all kinds of food." Christmas -- once banned in China -- has grown rapidly in recent years mainly as a shopping festival, with marketers using everything from saxophones and Smurfs to steam trains to get consumers to open their wallets.

"I never tried eating so many eggs before, and I feel I still haven't reached my limit," Pan added.