Since the Dope- both the column and the message board- have had a long history of weird bodily function-related questions, I figured I’d pose two questions about Poopin’ that have been floating through my head for a while now:
-Do you weigh less after Poopin’? That is, does your Poopin’ add to your body weight?
-Could a person survive by only drinking their Peein’ and eating their Poopin’ each time it happened and nothing else, or would the Peein’ and Poopin’ eventually stop since there were no more “raw materials” for the body to process?
Question #1 - yes. My children and I have done the tare subtraction to weigh individual deposits. We did not do it as a family project or anything, but it has come up in conversation, so I know they’ve done it, too. Anything that leaves your body lightens you temporarily.
Question #2 - You need the raw materials and will need it pretty darn soon. If there’s enough fluid in your diet (lots of fruit and yogurt, maybe), you might get away with recycling fluids. At least for awhile. But the solids will loose all nutrient value very soon.
[ol]
[li] Yes, of course. Why wouldn’t you?[/li][li] It wouldn’t “stop”; you’d simply die of malnutrition since all the nutrients would be used up and you’d only have unusable products left over (and water, which will not sustain you long).[/li][/ol]
Yeah, contrary to what a lot of people seem to think, your body pretty much gets every usable piece of nutrition out of food on it’s first pass through. I guess that in theory there would be some nutritional value in the gut flora that’s also expelled in feces, but not much, besides which they wouldn’t reproduce anymore if you stopped eating anyway.
Question 1: Guess you’ve never wrestled. But think about it. Poop has mass. That mass used to be inside you. Now it’s not. How could you not have lost weight?
Question 2: gross.
I think you would very probably die faster by doing this than if you just fasted. The bacteria present in the bottom end of the digestive system can be dangerous if they’re introduced to the top end - indeed some of them are the same bacteria responsible for the worst kinds of food poisoning.
Vomiting and diarrhoea aren’t great at the best of times, but in a situation where fluid intake is critical, I think it would become quite serious, quite quickly.
Even laying aside the massive infections you’d probably get from eating your feces, there’s little to no nutrient value- your body has already sucked everything good out of it.
Urine is a slightly different beast, though- it’s sterile, and wouldn’t be particularly harmful to drink. It’s loaded with salts, though, and wouldn’t do you much good either.
One thing people seem to forget - you lose water from your system through more than just urine. Plain breathing can get rid of lots of moisture via the lungs, and sweating does the trick as well. So recycling urine as your only source of water will leave you dehydrated very quickly.
Also, urea is a toxin produced by metabolic processes. Reconsuming that urea without additional water will increase the concentration of urea in the body. This will interfere with metabolic processes. Your kidneys will not be able to flush out urea (which will crystallise in the kidneys, poisoning them) and you will die. This is why renal failure (shutdown kidneys) kills people very quickly.
So drinking urine is ok in small quantities, when you have access to additional fresh water. It can be used in an emergency (as long as it is not too yellow) for a short period of time as a sole source of rehydration. But you can’t keep redrinking your own output for an extended period of time - it will kill you just as surely as renal failure.
You can lose weight by pooping or peeing. If you eat a meal that weighs two pounds, you should weigh two pounds more if you were to do a ‘before’ and ‘after’ weigh-in on a very accurate scale.
This is why weighing yourself too frequently can drive you nuts. Your body weight can fluctuate 2-4 pounds just based on water intake/retention, bowel movements and weight of the food you ingest or pass.
Ideally, you would be able to calculate the am’t of water and waste and deduct it from any weigh-in, but since this is not possible you have a range of error that is easily 2-4 lbs every time you weigh yourself. Plus… the scale has a range of error of about 1-2lbs, plus any variation in the weight of the clothes you wear at weigh in.
The laws of thermodynamics tell us that total personal recycling cannot work from an energetic point of view. Even if you used your own waste to grow algae (that can process CO[sub]2[/sub],feces and urine into a perfect balance of carbohydrate, fat and protein), and allowed additional solar energy into the system to drive it, you would not survive - I doubt that your feces could support enough algae to capture enough additional solar energy to make up the losses through biological inefficiency. Attempts to do this on a large scale (such as the Biosphere project) have failed spectacularly. Some small scale attempts can run for a fair length of time - look at the Ecosphere.
Beside losing mass through the water in your breath, you also lose mass by breathing out CO2. Oxygen (O2) has a molar mass of 32 while CO2 has a molar mass of 44. This means that you breath out more mass than you take in simply from the conversion of oxygen to carbon dioxide.
So assuming you could avoid sweating losing water by breathing and drink your urine and eat your shit, you would still waste away.
But think about it. Poop has mass. That mass used to be inside you. Now it’s not. How could you not have lost weight?