What is the breakdown by weight of the elements in the food we eat each year?

Factual Questions
1

Just something I started to wonder about while staring at the nutrition panel on this morning’s cereal. We consume stuff every day (pretty much) in the form of food and drink and we mostly talk about it in terms like fat, protein, fiber, some minerals and vitamins… but if you get down to it, what we’re taking in is atoms of various elements. Which ones? How much of each by weight?

I’m guessing that oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen are the vast majority, but clearly we also consume things like sodium, potassium, iron, phosphorus, lead, copper and so forth. I say this based solely on some long ago biology class in college and mostly on the fact that some medical tests exist to check to make sure we don’t have too much or too little of them if some problem arise, and how else would these things get into our bodies? (Okay, we breathe in gases, too.)

According to a few minutes of googling, the average human consumes X tons of food over a lifetime, with the X being variously given at 34 to 50 tons. Which is a not exactly a well-nailed down quantity, is it? (Maybe sometimes they include water, sometimes not?) But for now, let’s arbitrarily say the truth is 35 tons over an average life time of 70 years. 35 times 2000 lbs/ton (ignoring various types of tons) divided by 70 years comes to 1000 pounds of food/drink a year.

About 2.7 pounds a day, which I guess is not totally unreasonable? Anyway, let’s go with that. Out of this year’s 1000 pounds of elemental intake, how much of it is each element?

2

Whoops! Just realized I left Carbon off the “lotsa” list.

Anyone ever seen a news story admonishing us to be sure to keep our intake of silicon or aluminum or argon or whatever up or down to some value?

3

Honestly I’m not sure how to answer this super-broad OP, other than to say that most of your food will be made of the basic CHONPS group that make up most biomolecules.

If you’re looking for fun facts about other nutritional elements, selenium is one where you need a very specific trace amount for good health, but you’ll have problems if you consume too much of it.

Then there are other things where there aren’t any recommendations about too much or too little because the intake depends on other things. For example, too much or too little chloride can be problematic, but since you’d typically only ingest it with sodium, potassium, or other light metals, you’ll see problems with those elements long before the chloride ever becomes a concern.

4

Don’t forget Ca. By weight it outranks phosphorous and sulfur, at least in terms of what percentage our body is made of. Bones are heavy :winking_face_with_tongue:. I’d also add Na, K, Mg, and Cl, in the form of sodium, potassium, magnesium, and chloride ions, as the next contributors. Fe, as the iron part of the hemoglobin molecule, is likely next on the list. I’d guess I after that, as the iodine component of thyroid hormones. After that you get into really minor stuff that likely contributes less than 0.01% by weight. Selenium, zinc, bromine, lithium, fluorine, and nickel in very small amounts (and some of those not completely essential, we could live, but in poor health, without them). After that we get into things that we consume because they come along for the ride, but aren’t necessary for our health. Argon, being 1% of air, is likely at the top of the list for how much we consume of the elements that aren’t necessary for health.

5

Don’t you remember the belief that aluminum cookware and antiperspirants with aluminum compounds cause dementia?

6

Almost certainly a correlation rather than causation. It just so happens we started using products with aluminum more frequently in the last 100 years or so. That just so happens to correlate with the “western lifestyle” becoming more common, especially eating larger amounts of junk. That in turn leads to increased amounts people with diseases like type 2 diabetes and hypertension, which in turn lead to increased amounts of people with dementia.