Imagine, if you will, that I am a zombie (I’m not, but for the sake of Science!, let’s pretend). I hunt down a normal, healthy and well-nourished 30-year-old American male, crack open his cranial vault, and chow down. Assume I eat the entire brain, to include the brain stem. How much must I lumber after the living in order to burn off this indulgence?
In other words: I understand that myelin is pretty much fat and proteins. I know CSF contains a whole lot of glucose in it. Combine the two and I imagine that human brain is one high-calorie snack. I can find nutrition information for various animal brains (such as beef and pork), but unsurprisingly, not human. I know pigs are considered to be fairly anatomically similar to humans, but does that extend to the composition of the brain? Can I safely just multiply the calories to get a rough estimate of how many calories I’d get from eating a human brain? Would there be any significant nutritional difference between a pig’s brain and a human one?
Weight of human brain about 1300 gm, 77% of it water.
11% fat = 143 gm fat 143gm * 9 Cal/gm = 1287 Cal
8% protein = 104 gm protein 104 * 4 Cal/gm = 416 Cal
1% carbohydrate = 13 gm carb 13 * 4 = 52 Cal (Zombies are on very low carb diets. It’s the ketosis that makes their breath smell so.)
1287+416+52 = 1755 Cal in a smallish human brain. You’d spill most of the CSF and there is only 125 to 150 ml to start with, which in total would contain way less than a gram of carbs and protein. Ignore it.
Short version though is that yes on a weight basis mammalian brains have similar enough composition as to be roughly interchangable on a by weight basis.
How much do you burn lumbering? If you are power lumbering it might last you very long.
According to this, walking to a neighbor’s house for social reasons (and meals are social, of course), burns roughly 175 calories/hour, so that’s a lot of walking to burn off my treat. In reality, I imagine lumbering, as it’s rather slow, would burn calories a bit more slowly.
I figure power lumbering lumbering is a pretty inefficient activity. Maybe a bit more calories than power walking. Hours yes, but you’ll still be getting peckish later in the day. And nothing worse than a peckish zombie.
(Not sure what disturbs me more - that I frequent a board that asks these questions or that I find trying to answer them fun!)
I would imagine human brain is nutritionally not much different from raw beef brain, which is 143 calories per 100 grams. So if the human brain is 1300 grams, it contains 1859 calories.
She probably did need an answer fast but couldn’t really admit that. I know for a fact that at the time of the OP, Sports Authority was having a sale on dual tread treadmills - just the kind you would want to buy if you had the uneven gait characteristic of zombies.
Zombies have a problem similar to CSF vampires. They are surrounded by delectable treats, so easily plucked, and therefore have to struggle to maintain their girlish figures (even boy zombies and vampires are caught up in this craze now). Actually, it’s worse for vampires with a sweet-fang since they can slip into and out of your spinal cord so easily while mingling in a crowd and the only symptoms you will have are a general malaise and lack of energy for several days.
Nice attempt at pretending that you’re not part of the zombie-industrial complex. :dubious: