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Giz AsksIn this Gizmodo series, we ask questions about everything from space to butts and get answers from a variety of experts.
The average American eats almost a ton of food a year. This breaks down to roughly 630 of milk, cheese and ice cream, 185 pounds of meat, and an increasingly high dosage of anti-depressants. But where does human flesh fit in? Humans shed something like 500 million skin cells a day. The fact is that these literal millions of shed cells are making it right into our mouths, often—especially—when we think we’re only eating a couple of eggs or whatever.
What’s the final tally, eating-dead-skin-cells-wise? Laying on our deathbeds, will be ever be able to know the precise poundage of flesh we’ve eaten in a lifetime? For this week’s Giz Asks, we turned to a number of reputable dermatologists for some answers. It is maybe not so surprising that, as we learned, no serious scholar has devoted any research to getting a proper estimate on this one. But our experts gamely arranged their own equations.
Dr. Johann E. Gudjonsson
Professor of Skin Molecular Immunology and Associate Professor of Dermatology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
To my knowledge, nobody has actually tried to measure this, but I guess it depends on whether you bite your nails or not. If you do, I’d expect it to be a lot over the course of an entire lifetime—probably up to at least few hundred grams, if not more. But if you don’t, then probably not more than a few grams.
You also have to take into account that the inside of your mouth, down to the opening of the stomach, is covered in what’s called stratified epithelia—similar to but not the same as the skin—and so that will add quite substantially to this amount over one’s entire lifetime.