Top Highlights

• For example, metabolising the 40 grams of sugar in a can of soft drink produces 60 grams of carbon dioxide, which is about 33 litres of the gas. Exhaled air is only 4 per cent CO2 so, at rest, it takes an adult about 1840 breaths to exhale all that carbon. That’s 1 hour and 40 minutes of breathing, and all that expired air would fill 55 standard pa...
• The fact that 60 per cent of your body weight consists of oxygen atoms makes sense, too, when you recall that human beings are 60 per cent water, and that 90 per cent of a H2O molecule’s mass is oxygen.
• On average, the cremains weighed about 3.5 per cent of the ‘perimortem’ body weight. The ashes of a 70-kilogram person therefore typically weigh about 2.5 kilograms. Where do the other 67.5 kilograms go? The answer, by now, should be a very familiar one. Nearly all of our mass eventually becomes carbon dioxide and water again.
• if you want to understand how weight loss works, you need to remember that your body is made of atoms and that those atoms have rules.
• Rule 1: Atoms give you mass