Hey all. I haven’t posted here in a while, but now I have a question that I’m hoping this intellectually enterprising lot can help me with. I’ve written Cecil about this, but I’d like some backup in case I don’t get a reply.
The other day, a friend told me “you eat a pound of dirt a year,” meaning of course that the average person inhales about a pound of dirt every year.
I told her that I think this is pure bull. I figure it probably derives from an older myth about eating/inhaling a pound of dirt in a lifetime causing instant death. Still, I can’t find any confirmation for either side, so I’m hoping someone here can provide it. This may not be a wide-spread thing, but from the context she said it in, I think it could be an urban legend (or a variant on one) that I’m just not familiar with. Anybody have any data or opinions?
I think this is about your diet, and contaminents in food products, a certain amount of which is legally permissible. For some reason the classic example seems to be insect parts in hot dogs.
I have no actual info on this: however, a pound does not seem out of line to me, as a percentage of how many total pounds of food/drink we take in every year.
A good rule to include in your bulldung detection system is that nice round numbers are usually picked out of thin air. While it may be safe to assume that everyone inhales some particulate dust every day, and it may be possible that somebody, somewhere, has added it up, the odds of coming to a sweet round number like a pound a year are uncommonly slim.
Anyway, I wouldn’t worry much about eating dirt. The “inert ingredients,” or binders, that make up the bulk of most pills is clay.
Eating and inhaling are two very different things. However, I’d have no trouble believing either claim, but don’t find it either astounding or fascinating whenever someone tells me these alleged facts.
Define dirt.
Dirt is “soil” for this discussion?
A pound a year works out to 1.24 g/day or 52 mg/hour. 50 mg is enough dirt to make a small but highly noticable pile. There’s not that much dirt in the air, and unless you make a habit of eating unwashed garbanzos, there’s not all that much dirt in your food either.
There is a riddle that goes something like this-
Explain this statement:
People eat over an inch (or pound) of dirt every year.
You get the answer when you realize that the word “over” in this statement means “on top of”, not “more than”.
Maybe your friend got confused with this riddle.
Yes, but the odds of someone coming up with a number like 0.82 pounds/year which someone else rounds to a pound are much more reasonable. That’s not to say I buy into this statistic; I just don’t buy into the “round number -> made up story” idea either.