Is it true that we lose 21 grams of weight at death? If so where doew it go?
No.
It goes…TO HELL!!!
Old thread: 21 Grams (dead body stuff)
-The second link still works
It’s a test. You ask people if they believe that the body loses 21 grams at death.
If they say yes, then you know they’ll believe anything.
Only recently have I herad about this. I want to know who gets weighed just prior to death and then immediately after? And, “they” claim it’s always the same weight regardless of who you are (man, woman, child) from all walks of life. It’d be impossible to know, wouldn’t it?
The ones involved with Dr. MacDougall’s study, so it seems. He weighed the terminally ill on a special bed.
Aside from the inanity of the concept, there is no “moment” of death for folks checking out the way Dr MacDougall watched 'em depart.
We die relatively slowly when we’re just sort of dying. You’re not alive one moment and dead the next. Some respirations here and there; some agonal heart rhythms; a few twitches; a rally…on and on it goes. Many Med students learn the hard way not to be too hasty pronouncing the mostly-dead completely dead.
The whole experiment was very crude and heavily skewed toward an underlying bias (apparently a sincere one) but it’s much more likely that what happened is this: when the individual was peri-mortem and there was a tiny shift in the weight, Dr M decided they had just given up the 21 gram ghost. If you are looking for tiny changes in the nearly dead, and you get a tiny fluctuation, it’s pretty easy to let yourself believe that’s the right moment to prounce them.
Huh? 
:dubious: I watched my dad taken off of life support in the presence of medical personel. There was definitly a moment of death. 
I was holding my Grandmother’s hand when she died. She kinda “relaxed”, for want of a better term. I didn’t weigh her.
**Chief Pedant ** explicitly said “the way Dr. MacDougall watched 'em depart.” Those patients were not on life support.
In any case, how do you decide the exact moment of death? No brain waves? No heart beat? When the last cell in the body dies?