Say I take one fresh human corpse, and slice it in two following the spine - that is, head to toe (though actual cutting would stop at the groin) going through the centre of the chest. I take the left side of the body and stick it on one side of some scales, and the right side on another. If I do this with many corpses, should I expect that on average the body halves will be balanced, or unbalanced? And if unbalanced, what makes it so, and roughly how unbalanced would it be?
I’d expect that uneven muscular development influenced by handedness will tend to cause an imbalance even in the absence of other factors. You’ll probably find that the imbalance predominantly follows chirality; right-handed people will, on average, be heavier on one side, but left-handed folks will favor the other side.
Let’s see, internal organs are not all symetrical, so that’ll be a factor. Liver is on the right side, stomach on the left. The liver is a dense, heavy organ, and the stomach is not. This would be partially compensated by the heart, which is mostly on the left. Then again you have to decide if you’re leaving all the fluid in or not.
Some time back (before 1974) my buddy Roger went to a chiropractor for some complaint. Among other things (no doubt a cracking of the spinal vertebrae, etc.), the ‘doctor’ put him on a special scale, with the left foot on one scale, the right foot on another.
Roger saw he was a few pounds heavier on side, than he was on the other. I swear to God, the chiro told him to sleep on the other lighter side until he went back in 1 or 2 weeks. So Roger did what he was told and when he returned and got on the scales again. Lo and behold, his weight was the same on both scales.
Lawd, it’s a miracle!!! :eek: :eek: :eek:
I seriously doubt there’s any science to this. It was funny as hell to me than, just as it is now.
Here it is at least 32 years later and I still laugh.
If you have a couple of bathroom scales, try this thing out. Then sleep on your lighter side so gravity will tug all your organs back to their normal distribution and thus balance you out. Which was the chiropractor’s explanation. 
You’ll feel so much better.
Paging gabriela…
There are a few people who are opposite handed!
Their internals are symetrically opposite to the rest of us. They consider us as being abnormal. :rolleyes:
Don’t tease me, twickster; you know I read the Dope from work, but can’t answer until I get home.
All this talk about muscle neglects the important stuff. The stuff I weigh every day. Let’s play with Viscera!
Let’s assume we’ve got your standard 70 kg man right here. And let’s assume he’s normal and not sick. Okay, right lung, 400 grams. Left lung, 320 grams (the left always weighs a titch less than a third less than the right - because the right has 3 lobes and the left, 2).
Heart weighs maybe 350 gm. But you can’t say the heart is on the left. Just look at it under the chest plate. It’s lying on the midline in the mediastinum with only part of it pointing towards the left side. I saw a heart repair once during a trauma surgery in the eighties in Brooklyn where they were trying to throw a stitch in the heart while it was still beating; it was dashing back and forth all over the place. So let’s say, on average, a third of the heart is on the right side, and two thirds on the left. Okay, right side is 115, left 235.
The aorta’s all on the left side in the chest; it weighs about seventy grams. Once you pass through the diaphragm, though, it’s awfully close to the midline, and the inferior vena cava takes over its place just to the right of the midline. I’d call that a wash.
The liver weighs a good 1500 grams, but it’s not all on the right hand side. Its left lobe crosses the midline and fastens all the way over onto the left hemidiaphragm. However, the left lobe is Wimpy wimpy wimpy and the right is Hefty hefty hefty. I’ll say maybe 1200 to the right and 300 grams to the left.
The stomach arcs back and forth across the midlne, advantage to the left; let’s pretend it’s empty so we don’t have to weigh the food in it. The duodenum’s entirely on the right. I’ve never weighed either so let’s call it a wash. Same for the pancreas; although its boty and most of its tail are on the left, the heavy head is on the right; let’s say it evens out. But the spleen is on the left, and that’s a good 150 grams worth of weight to the left.
Surprise! The left kidney is usually quite a bit heavier than the right. Why I don’t know - maybe the liver presses down on the developing kidney in fetal life? Let’s say 130 for the right kidney and 160 for the left. The adrenals weigh the same on each side.
What’s that add up to? Looks to me like the right has 1845 grams worth of weighable viscera, and the left has 1235. Definite advantage to the right!
Does your right arm weigh more than your left arm if you’re a right-handed guy of average atheleticism? Dunno. That’s just steak, and I don’t weigh it.
I say the right side wins by two-thirds of a liver!
Hot Damn! Now that’s science in action!
Love ya, gabby! 
For the average person, being right-handed or left-handed is mostly to do with dexterity, largly dealing with the tiny muscles in the fingers & wrist. These will probably be more responsive & stronger than in your other hand, but they are so small that it’s doubtful there would be any significant difference in the weight of the entire hand-arm-shoulder part.
For an athelete, there might be an actual difference in the arm-shoulder musculature. Like a right-handed batter, passer, or boxer, who would likely have worked with that arm more than the other. And changes in the biceps & shoulder muscles would be enough to weigh more.
But in general, right-handed people are left-footed. They tend to use their left foot more, start walking by stepping with that foot, and stand with more of their weight on that foot. Their left foot itself will be bigger than the right foot. (On some people, enough different that the foot really ought to have a larger shoe. But they don’t – they buy one pair and count on the left shoe stretching enough to work. This is well-known to employees in shoe/boot stores.) This tends to make the calf & thigh muscles of the left leg somewhat larger than the right. Since those are some of the larger muscles in the body, they could cause a significant weight difference between sides.
I think the net result would be that, for the average person, these weight differences would tend to cancel out. Gabriela’s difference is only about 1% of the weight of a normal body – individual variances in growth could easily be more significant than that.
Well there ya go, I didn’t know that.
Hey Gab, do you think it’s cuz the liver takes up so much space? You didn’t mention blood, are all your measurments dry wts? How much would blood add to the wt of the heart and aorta?
I love you guys
I didn’t figure in blood cuz it’s in motion. It’d be like leaning out of a news helicopter trying to count all the cars coming out of driveways and on tiny little suburb and city streets and flowing towards main highways and on the big expressways, to see where most of the cars were. Sheesh! Would they just stop moving!
I hoped the blood would even out between the sides of the body. But you’ve kind of got a point. The blood in the heart may weigh fifty grams. In the aorta, maybe twenty. So you got another seventy to divide.
The rest of the weights are wet weights. Stuff weighs a whole lot less in people when they bleed out before dying. Some of it goes down much more than others (the spleen can drop like a parachutist) but all of it goes down some. I picked out average weights, too; kidneys in a little woman can weigh 90 and 110, while the heart in a great big man who has high blood pressure and never takes care of it can reach what we call “cor bovinum” - heart of an ox - seven hundred and up. I had a colleague who once autopsied a man with a 1000 gm heart. Cause of death: cocaine IN THE HOSPITAL. (Found the vial in is bedside drawer after his empty room was tidied up, and the coke in his bloodstream. Sigh.)
You know, the liver really does take up a lot of space. It’s the Jupiter of the viscera. In the last year I have formed the distinct impression that the caudate lobe of the liver exists because there’s this teensy little space between the esopagus and the stomach where there was nothing going on, and instead of filling it up with fat the way the normal body packaging wizards would do, the liver pooched out a little lobe just to use the space.
Why yes I do anthropomorphize tissues, don’t you?
They don’t talk back to me when I talk to them. Yet.
Certainly possible. Alas, no data. Which means we have no idea if my 1% difference is a difference that makes any difference. Or not. Which means it’s a nitpickery difference. Which means on this board I RULE!!! Nitpickery WINS!
Awww, Qaddy!
I’ll take “Dopers whose houses I don’t want to eat at” for $5000…
…but seriously, cool, definitive answer. That’s Good Doping .
I’m a lefty trained as righty.
So, I write and draw with my right hand but my dominant foot and my strongest hand are the left.
I assume my Steak Weight Distribution would thus correspond to a lefty and not a righty.
I love the phrase Steak Weight Distribution.
Can you expand on this a bit?
Most right-handed people I know are also “right-footed”, in that they will use the right foot for kicking soccer balls etc.
The left foot tends to be used purely as a platform, while the right foot does the hard work requiring control.
I’m not sure then whether that would favour greater left-leg development, or right leg?
It might be that my understanding of “footedness” is the opposite - ie. your kicking leg is subordinate to your standing leg in determining whether you’re left- or right-footed.
Uh?
I remembered the kindergarten teacher hitting my left hand whenever I used it to draw. Mom’s always claimed it was my hyperactive imagination.
When I was 10 my parents signed me up for tennis lessons. I write with my right so I was supposed to hold the racket with the right. When the teacher sent the ball to my right, I’d change hands and hit it backwards; when he sent it to the left, I’d change hands and hit forward. Instead of saying “ok, let’s try you as a lefty”, he yelled at me. Since my argument of “but I did hit it!” wasn’t considered valid, I didn’t last long in that class.
Then when I was in 8th grade, the PhysEdTeacherFromHell (Satan let her out because she got on his nerves) got pregnant and her sub was her sister. By looking at which foot we put forward first, she informed several of us that we’re lefties for sports. I jump a meter higher when I follow the leftie inpath than using the rightie one.
All of us who were informed of our left-footedness by Ana had similar memories re either kindergarten or our grannies and forks.
Methinks many of those “right-handed, left-footed” people are merely trained that way. Nobody screams at you for walking with the wrong foot.
I’m right-handed and definitely right-footed. (I’m a tap-dancer, so I’ve had years of noticing which foot is dominant.)
So we righties can now look down on those lefties? I knew it, I just knew it.
I was at a running expo picking up my packet for a race and this chiropractor dude had a booth. I got on his scales and it said that I had one side which was 17lbs heavier than the other side. I thought it was all bull, but other people got on that were balanced. He said that my football injury (shoulder) was probably causing it. He wanted to get me in and examine me. I was very doubtful that I was still injured, since I had full range (though my shoulder was more open to injury than before) and it hadn’t been hurting for quite some time. Should I be concerned with such weight differentials?
“Footed” is an interesting idea. This week, WhyBaby was in for her developmental check-up (as a micropreemie, she’s followed very closely by a number of specialists). I pointed out how she seems to have a limited range-of-motion in the left leg - when she walks, she won’t bring her left foot forward as far as the right, when she plays with something on the floor, she has her left knee on the ground, but her right foot planted, so she’s only half-kneeling, when she tries to step away, it’s always with the right foot - seems pretty clear that she’s “right-legged”, and her left leg is weaker or somehow restricted, right?
Nope. Her left leg is STRONGER. It’s not that she won’t move her left leg, it’s that she won’t bear all her weight on the right for very long. So all this time I’ve been working with her to move her left leg more, and she’s been thinking, “but Mama, if I move that one, then this other one wobbles!” So we need to strengthen her right leg before she’s going to be willing to use her left one as much.
My point? Even though she’s “right-footed”, her left leg has more muscle mass. Not measurable with a tape measure, her legs look even, but the left is definitely stonger.