Total amount of feces produced: 6734 pounds. That's a 30,000 lb deficit, and about a quarter pound produced per day. Now much of the food has lots of water, and many of the energy producing components are metabolized to water, but I still think that latter number is, well, full of it.
Sunday, July 25, 2010
Why I Take InfoGraphics With A Grain of Salt
Total amount of food eaten: 36,750 pounds... seems like a reasonable estimate. That's about a pound and a half a day.Total amount of feces produced: 6734 pounds. That's a 30,000 lb deficit, and about a quarter pound produced per day. Now much of the food has lots of water, and many of the energy producing components are metabolized to water, but I still think that latter number is, well, full of it.
Total amount of feces produced: 6734 pounds. That's a 30,000 lb deficit, and about a quarter pound produced per day. Now much of the food has lots of water, and many of the energy producing components are metabolized to water, but I still think that latter number is, well, full of it.
What I can't figure out is that the website they got the data from says that we poop 7 lbs a day, which is 2500 lbs a year, or 180,000 lb in a lifetime. Some other websites put it around 1.5 lbs per day which equates to 40,000 lbs per lifetime, which is STILL more than they say we eat in a lifetime.
ReplyDeleteOh and paris to shanghai is almost 6,000 miles, there and back, 12,000. You do that twice and get 24,000 miles, not really close to the 35,000 miles they say we walk.
ReplyDeleteAlthough walking around the alps, himalayans, and the black and caspian seas may add some distance.
I don't think we can trust any of this data.
I didn't bother to track down the source sites; just the discrepancy between the Q in vs. Q out set off my BS detector. But it's interesting that they didn't even copy the source data accurately, and flubbed some simple geography as well. At a certain point, credibility is utterly lost; this graphic is well beyond that point.
ReplyDeleteCredibility is apparently long gone. The Web is full of this kind of information. Pump it out is the name of the game. Worthless.
ReplyDeleteCredibility *and* reading comprehension. You have taken the amount quoted as the lifetime food total for *Americans* and compared it to the waste total for everyone. I suspect the worldwide average total food intake is much closer to the African number than the American.
ReplyDeleteAh also fwiw, the large majority of mass in the food we eat is water, as is the majority of mass we excrete (as urine).