OK, folks, here’s another chance to show the world how smart you are and how misinformed/mistaken/ignorant at least one of the Teaming Millions is.
I am a Liberal Arts type with advanced degrees in business and education. My significant other is a physician. I admit up front that this question is entirely out of my fields of expertise, and entirely within hers. However, I do have three or four still-functioning memory cells, and remember (maybe from junior high science class; God knows I avoided the hard stuff later on) something about “matter can be neither created or destroyed, but its form can be changed.” This got me into trouble, as, after a hedonistic weekend together indulging in various foods, my SO commented that she had gained four pounds. This led to a discussion of weight gain in general, and a disagreement in which we decided that we needed y’all to do the Solomon thing. Here’s the core of the debate:
My SO, the doctor, says that eating a pound of chocolate will cause one to gain more weight than eating a pound of lettuce. I say that the maximum you can gain from eating either would be one pound, and even that would require the total conversion of the intake to body mass, which seems unlikely. Says she, “There’s more energy, in the form of calories, in the chocolate, and this energy is used to create the additional mass and thus weight.” Sez I, “Out of what is the extra mass created?” She then retreated into muttering about biochemistry, Kreb’s Cycle or Spin Cycle or something, and basically said that I was too dumb to understand. I conceded that point, but never did get a “Cecil” type answer to the question, “Where does the extra mass come from?” Do we have a Cold-Fusion Recombobulator organ that converts the energy in food into more mass than was put in? My non-scientific mind sees it more like putting a pound of kerosene in your car’s fuel tank verses a pound of gasoline–the car runs worse on kerosene than it does on gasoline, and more crap comes out the exhaust pipe, but the car still only gains a pound.
Please answer carefully–this will be thrown in somebody’s face for years to come, during every argument.
Of course there can not be more weight gained than there was originally food, the important question is how much of the food-stuff is kept as mass in your body. The chocolate is made up of a large percentage of fat, which your body absorbs and stores for fuel later. This was great in the time of cave men when you might have to out run a tiger with only the mamouth leg you had for dinner, but now-a-days it tends to stick around for a while. Lettuce on the other hand is made up mostly of water and undigestible cellous, which you either sweat out or passes right through you. So the pound goes into you the same, and if you stepped on the scale right after eating you’d be a pound heavier in either case, but the chocolate is much more likely to hang around and be noticable later.
The chocolate would definately cause you to gain more weight in the long run.
Lettuce, of any type, is mostly water, and that water is easily removed from your body during urination. So you are losing at least half of the lettuce’s weight as pee, right off the bat.
Then, lettuce is a vegetable, and vegetables contain fiber, which cannot easily be digested, so good ol’ number two loses some of the lettuce in thew end. HA In the end! Get it? I’m a scream.
What you are left with is a meager few calories and some vitamins, depending on the variety of lettuce you choose.
Stupendous man is correct, even though he didn’t answer the question. What you need to do is redirect the question. Surely if you eat one pound of chocolate, you’re not going to gain more than one pound of weight. Its impossible. And don’t let her get you in the weight/mass argument. In this situation, its a red herring.
One pound of lettuce is mostly water - something your body likes and will use. One pound of chocolate is mostly evil - something your body thinks it will use much later in life, decides to store in your ass, and then never uses. No cycle, system, process is going to be fusing this chocolate with air intake or someothersuchthing to “create” more mass.
Point being, if you want to maintain this argument, I recommend going back to square one.
[li]Weigh yourself naked[/li]
[li]Eat a lot of salt. Not enough to harm you but more that a few grams.[/li]
[li]Weigh yourself naked the next morning[/li]You will find that your body has gained a lot more than just the weight of the few grams of salt. Yes, I know it’s merely water retention, but this serves as a splendid object lesson about how your body’s tendency to gain weight is affected by what you eat and not merely the weight of what you have eaten.
Right! The question isn’t “Which sticks around longer?”, it’s “Can you gain more weight than you eat?” The answer seems obvious to me, but you know how some people get when they’re wrong, especially if they happen to be short, well-educated, blonde females.
Do you breathe? I would hope so. You can gain more weight than the food you eat weighs IF(and this is a big if) the entire weight of the food is usuable by the body. Why? Because its combined with the oxygen you breathe in. It doesn’t actually work that way in reality because there is no such thing as a perfect food. There will always be waste products and unusable portions in said foods. As others have stated, yes the chocolate will cause you to gain more weight than the lettuce, because a lot of the lettuce is fiber(undigestable) and water(most of which will be elimated via urination, sweating, breathing etc). Whereas the chocolate is mostly sugar, which obviously our bodies convert and use(or change into fat and store for later).
You can think of it in terms of calories. As Nanook points out, the body uses oxygen, water, and food to build more body (part of which will be fat.)
I’m told that if you take in 3500 calories over what you expend you will gain a pound.
A pound of chocolate is about 2300 calories, give or take a few, so you would have to eat about 1 1/2 pounds of chocolate to gain a pound of fat, presuming that you were already at the limit of what you were going to expend at that point.
A pound of lettuce has about 80 calories, so you would have to eat almost 44 pounds of lettuce…and then, presumably die from some horrible intestinal blockage.
What?!? How does water retention equal weight gained?!?! Where did the water come from that you “retained”? Was it absorbed out of your matress through your skin? :rolleyes:
Azcat, my love, I win. The point I tried to make to you in the very beginning of that conversation was that it was the number of calories consumed, not the weight of the substance eaten that made the difference in weight gain. But if you want to think that you were right…
If my eating habits have any relevance here, I’d say that eating a pound of chocolate would result in much more than a 1-lb weight gain.
Because after scarfing down the chocolates, I’d probably grab for a big bag of potato chips, followed by a couple slices from last night’s pizza, followed by a hefty chunk of peanut-butter-ripple cheesecake, followed by a big belch.
I guess we can subtract whatever food molecules were contained in the belch.
The point I tried to make to you in the very beginning of that conversation was that it was the number of calories consumed, not the weight of the substance eaten that made the difference in weight gain. But if you want to think that you were right…