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Some call it gluttonous. Others call it social commentary. But to Dustin Schirer, it's simply fat-tastic.

A photo of the eight-pound Bacon Cheese Pizza Burger he crafted on Super Bowl Sunday has recently joined the artery-clogging online gallery of This Is Why You're Fat .

And he couldn't be prouder.

"Just the sheer size and thought of it," he gushed about his creation over the phone from Kansas City, Mo. "I think that anything that's so disgustingly delicious like this just kind of has some kind of funny factor to it."

The 25-year-old Web producer and his buddies gleefully documented the process as they smacked five pounds of cheese-and-bacon-filled hamburger between two extra-large stuffed crust pizzas and baked the 17,000-calorie behemoth until golden brown.

The next day, Mr. Schirer submitted a snap to This Is Why You're Fat: Where Dreams Become Heart Attacks, a blog where anyone can contribute photos of fattening foods they've made or eaten in restaurants.

Since its launch on Feb. 9, This Is Why You're Fat has made people all over the continent salivate, recoil in disgust, or both. And it has highlighted a new brand of foodie voyeurism that thumbs its nose at North America's obesity crisis and gourmet snobs alike.

While shrines to gross eats have cropped up online in recent months - perhaps fuelled by hype surrounding the Bacon Explosion, a barbecued bacon-wrapped sausage dish that The New York Times wrote about in late January - www.thisiswhyyourefat.com is the first one-stop shop, its creators say.

The photo menu, which offers everything from the Bacon and Fudge Danish Breakfast Sandwich to the more ambitious Meat Ship, made of bacon, sausages, pastry, franks and minced pork, has people coming back for more. The site has garnered seven and a half million views and more than 2,000 submissions since its inception.

Book agents have also been in touch, say the site's two New York-based creators, who have asked to remain anonymous until they cut a deal. As the name suggests, This Is Why You're Fat is a commentary of sorts on America's obesity crisis, though that wasn't the original intention, one of the creators says.

"It started as a joke, something amusing and weirdly fascinating, and then we were kind of 'There's little truths in every joke,' " she says. "If our site functioned as a menu and you ate everything that was on there, that's not going to be good for you."

"Some of the stuff on the site, it's hard to fathom you'd even eat it," she adds.

But some people, like Mr. Schirer, do. And concoctions like his Bacon Cheese Pizza Burger inspire one-upmanship. Just look at the McNuggetini, a McDonald's chocolate milkshake with vanilla vodka, rimmed with BBQ sauce and garnished with a chicken McNugget.

But what is it, exactly, that fixes our gaze on a Krispy Kreme Bacon Cheddar Cheeseburger?

Greg Johnson, a 33-year-old production editor in New York, submitted a photo of Ditch Dogs, hot dogs laden with gooey macaroni and cheese served at the restaurant Ditch Plains. He loves the voyeuristic aspect of the site, which he visits regularly.

"My first impression was, 'Oh my God, this food is crazy," he says. "It's the food equivalent of going to an amusement park."

Foodies liken it more to a car crash.

When Mark Morton first laid eyes on the site, he admitted it was hard to look away.

"It's enticing and revolting at the same time," says the author of Cupboard Love: A Dictionary of Culinary Curiosities and contributor to behindtheburner.com , a foodie resource website.

"There's something almost cadaverous about them," he says, suggesting the heavy bacon, meat and lard content could potentially be lethal.

It's not just peering in at the way other people eat; it truly is a form of entertainment, says Corby Kummer, a senior editor of The Atlantic and writer-in-residence at Stratford Chef School in Stratford, Ont.

"There's both voyeurism and a tremendous amount of exhibitionism going on because when you think of all these people who are constantly sending and making pictures of what they made and what they ate at restaurants, it's like compulsive documenting."

It's also food porn in the truest sense, Mr. Kummer said. He pointed to the popularity of the Times's Bacon Explosion article, which remained one of the top-read stories online days after publication.

"It's taking a much more literal analogy to pornography, because people are looking at something like the Bacon Explosion and mostly thinking, 'Boy, if only I could let myself do that.'"

In other words, a lot of us are living vicariously through someone else's heart-clogging adventures.

Mr. Schirer, who has also made an epic Cheez-Whiz-laden cheese steak, says he's just waiting for the next flash of inspiration to strike before sending his next submission.

In the meantime, he continues to visit thisiswhyyourefat.com regularly. And he likes how it's earning him a little bit of fame, if not an ounce of notoriety.

"I hope I can claim some sort of stake in America's obesity problem," he said with a laugh.