Comment by aixi
3 years ago
out of context, that quote is really funny; what happens once you reach 4650 calories? you start violating the rules of thermodynamics?
(i know your body starts compensating for it and burning less calories, but still)
3 years ago
out of context, that quote is really funny; what happens once you reach 4650 calories? you start violating the rules of thermodynamics?
(i know your body starts compensating for it and burning less calories, but still)
> what happens once you reach 4650 calories?
Well, we probably need to look at the direct quote again.
> There seems to be a hard limit on how many calories our bodies can burn per day, set by how fast we can digest food and turn it into energy.
Maybe i'm reading this wrong, but if one's body were to burn calories at 100% of this supposed possible rate, then by the time you'd reach 4650, a new day would start.
If digestion would top out at 4650 calories at day, with 24 hours per day, it would come down to 193.75 calories per hour. Or, in other words, it'd be about 3.23 calories per minute.
> what happens once you reach 4560 calories?
There are loads of videos on YouTube of what happens. You may or may not want to watch them. Spoiler alert: you vomit when you eat too much.
The vomit limit is probably higher than 4560 (which BTW has a suspicious number of significant digits), there might be a range between too many calories and vomiting where your body breaks down the food into waste without digesting any more nutrients/calories. Kinda like how if you eat too much vitamin C, you’ll just pee most of it out.
At some point your body will also fail to exert energy; there are also metabolic safeguards ahead of the point where your body can no longer manage the energy to keep basic functions going where the lower-priority functions (immune system, cognitive function, motion muscles) start to degrade.
You don't need to be at the limit of human energy intake to see what happens to people when their energy expenditure greatly exceeds the energy available from food over a sustained time period; there is quite a lot of medical literature on the effects of such... er... malnutrition.
Long term, yes. Short term you might be able to get some from fat stores. But the claim is that ~4650 is the most you can persistently get from food intake per day.
Sort of makes sense, the body is a machine and will get worn down/depleted at some point and not some infinite bag of holding. Surprised its as low at 4650 calories though, figured marathoners + swimmers and such could burn more.