Are you the kind of person who is worried about what they eat from day to day? Do you count your calories to make sure you’re not going overboard, or do you just kind of eat whatever until you’re not hungry anymore?
There’s a lot of science behind understanding the caloric needs of the human body, and while statistics say that most of us in the Western World tend to over consume, there are a lot of amazing things to discover about what and how we eat.
10. Bahrain Consumes the Most Calories Per Capita
Who consumes the most calories per capita is not as easy a question to answer as you might think. For starters, it changes from year to year. But the assumptions many people make are not always correct. The United States is often derided as being the “fattest” nation in the world, and make no mistake Americans have poor diets in general. But they are not the per capita leaders when it comes to calories consumed.
In 2023, the world leader for indulging in the highest calorie diets went to the country of Bahrain. Research from OurWorldinData based out of Oxford University suggested the average citizen of Bahrain pulled down 4,012 calories per day. Americans were close behind at 3,868 calories and then the Irish rounded out the top three at 3,850 calories.
Keep in mind that most diets that exist today are still based around the idea that the average adult should consume about 2,000 calories per day. You have to go quite far down the list to find my country that is only consuming 2,000 calories per capita.
9. Dwight Howard Ate Over 5,000 Calories Worth of Candy Per Day
If you are a basketball fan, you probably know Dwight Howard. He’s an NBA all-star, NBA champ, and he played for nearly decades in the NBA. He’s still playing the game today, but now he’s competing overseas. As a top-level, elite athlete you have to assume he had certain dietary restrictions to stay in shape. You have to assume that, but it doesn’t necessarily make it true.
Back in the year 2013, Howard was accused of having a candy addiction. Athletes do need to have high-calorie diets to keep up with the demands of their jobs, but Howard was a little different from most. He ate the equivalent of 24 chocolate bars worth of sugar daily. 5,000 calories worth of candy is what this man consumed on a daily basis while he was at the peak of his career in professional sports.
He’d been doing this for an entire decade. Apparently, this came to light when he started noticing tingling sensations in his fingers and toes and sought help from a doctor about it.
8. Strongmen May Eat 20,000 Calories a Day During Training
Strongmen are not athletes in the same way that basketball players or baseball players are. For a strongman to be good at what he does he has to be built like an oak tree that’s been around for a few centuries. A strongman’s diet doesn’t have to be healthy by any reasonable metric. A good example of this is the diet of strongman Robert Oberst who, while training, would take down 20,000 calories per day.
At 6-foot-8 and 400 pounds, Oberst’s diet was probably going to be a little more robust than the average person’s even if he wasn’t trying to pull trucks for a living. He eats six meals a day which can start with a breakfast of up to 10 eggs. He’ll consume 1.6 kilograms, or 3.5 pounds, of meat in a day as well, which includes a pair of steaks and six cups of rice.
Halfthor Bjornsson, who played the Mountain on Game of Thrones, also follows a huge training diet that includes half a dozen eggs and “dozens” of bacon for breakfast as the first of 6 meals which add up to 10,000 calories. This is just behind current World’s Strongest Man Tom Stoltman’s 13,000 calorie-a-day diet.
7. Medieval Peasants Would Have Eaten Close to 3,000 Calories Per Day
For some reason or other, many modern people have a very inaccurate picture of medieval peasants in their minds. We often think they were dirty and malnourished and that couldn’t be further from the truth. Not only did the average medieval peasant bathe regularly, but they also ate robustly. They had to if they were toiling in the fields all day.
Most peasants had a diet that would be about 2,900 calories per day or more. Some scholars even guessed their intake was as high as 6,000 to 9,000 calories a day. Aristocrats, despite having less physically demanding jobs, could eat as much as 4,000 to 5,000 calories per day and monks would be able to pull in over 6,000 calories.
None of this is to suggest that the diets of peasants were tasty, they probably had to eat the same food repeatedly, but at least they had a lot of it.
6. Cooked Food Has More Calories Than the Same Food Uncooked
Off the top of your head do you know what has more calories, a cooked carrot or a raw carrot? Presumably, if they were the exact same weight, and you added nothing to it during the cooking process, the carrots would have the same calories, right? If anything, you would think maybe the cooked carrot would somehow have less, since it probably shrank and dehydrated a bit in the cooking process. The opposite is true, however. In a technical sense, the cooked carrot would have more calories than the uncooked one. Technically.
In an experiment, researchers fed mice the same diet. Some of the mice got cooked meat and vegetables, other mice got raw meat and vegetables in the same proportions. The results showed that the cooked food gave the mice more energy than the raw food. More energy means more calories. But how?
One thing that is often overlooked in determining calorie counts is how much effort goes into digesting the food to get those calories in the first place. If you eat a completely raw diet, your stomach and organs have to work a little bit harder to digest that food to get the nutrients out.
However, when food is cooked, you’ve done much of the work for yourself already. That makes it easier for you to get the calories out of the food, and technically you get more energy as a result because you’re expending less to get it.
However, when food is cooked, you’ve done much of the work for yourself already. That makes it easier for you to get the calories out of the food, and technically you get more energy as a result because you’re spending less to get it.
Cooking has been shown to increase the net energy gain from all types of foods including starches, proteins, and lipid-rich foods. Whatever it is, you’ll get more calories if it’s cooked.
5. You Swallow About 200 Calories of Your Own Mucus Per Day
You’re not going to want to hear this, and we don’t really want to tell you, but every day you’re recycling about 200 calories by swallowing your own mucus. It’s not a net gain since the calories were already inside of you, but you could have lost them if you were able to spit and blow your nose enough to get rid of that stuff rather than having it trickle down the back of your throat and your stomach again.
Your body makes it at 1.5 quarts of mucus every single day, which is 6 cups or 1.4 liters. Most of it slides back down your throat without you ever noticing, every time you swallow. Keep in mind, this is all pretty natural and if you weren’t swallowing it you’d probably get dehydrated very quickly.
4. Rice, Corn, and Wheat Account for Over 50% of Calories Consumed Worldwide
People on the internet may be convinced that the source of most of the calories in the world is McDonald’s, but that doesn’t really hold up under scrutiny. While there are thousands of different things a person could eat in a day from hundreds of species of fish and seafood to thousands of different fruits and vegetables and fungus, there are a small number of things that account for a massive amount of calories in the human diet.
Rice, enjoyed the world over, accounts for over 20% of all the calories human beings consume. Corn also accounts for nearly 20% of all of our consumed calories. When you throw in wheat, those three staples together make up over 50% of all the calories consumed in the world. Just three different plants and that’s half of everything eaten by mankind in terms of calories.
3. A Blue Whale Spends 2,000 Calories Opening its Mouth and Eats 500,000 in a Mouthful
All animals need to consume calories to survive, and we’re just kind of biased towards humans for obvious reasons. But if you want to see surreal calorie killers you have to go into the ocean. While the average human may need 2,000 calories a day to be healthy, a blue whale is going to spend almost that much just to open its mouth and swallow its lunch.
Research on the size of a blue whale’s mouth combined with the density of the krill that whales eat has determined that the average mouthful is going to provide a blue whale with just shy of half a million calories. That’s a fraction of the 20 million to 50 million calories that it’s going to consume in a day. If a Big Mac has 590 calories, then a blue whale eats the equivalent of 84,746 Big Macs every day.
2. A Human Body Has Just Over 125,000 Calories
Let’s preface this entry by saying we’re not advocating cannibalism. That’s not a warning you hear every day, now is it? But, just for curiosity’s sake, let’s consider what would happen if you were going to eat a human body. How many calories do you think you’re getting out of that?
As it happens, the human body could sustain you for several days if you happen to be forced into a situation to eat one. The average person is worth about 125,000 calories, at least according to 1950s research on four corpses.
Naturally, the thighs are the best place to get high-calorie meat, coming in at 13,000 calories. The upper arms are just shy of 7,500 calories. Keep in mind, that these are averages. If you have a muscular bodybuilder, you’re going to get more mileage here. Inside the body, the heart is 650 while the brain is 2,700.
1. Rumor Has it That Andre the Giant Drank 7,000 calories of Alcohol Per Day
We’ve seen some massive scale numbers when it comes to calories, and we even focused on some smaller-scale things. Now let’s look at one of the most incredible human beings who ever lived. Born Andre Rousimoff, Andre the Giant was an actor and wrestler and an all-around stunning human being.
At over seven feet tall and more than 500 pounds, his size made him famous but also took its toll. The condition that led to his immense growth caused him great pain and Andre drank, in part, to help deal with that. He has been called the greatest drunk of all time.
There have been numerous stories from fellow wrestlers and also other actors about Andres’ incredible drinking. It said that he would consume up to 7,000 calories of alcohol in a single sitting. Keep in mind, that’s just alcohol calories and the man probably ate a few meals over the course of the day and had other things to drink before he got to the bar where he would polish off that much booze.
Because of Andre’s pain, this was not a once in a while drinking binge for him. This was his daily alcohol intake. He was known to have cases of wine brought backstage at wrestling events and he would drink all of it before his matches.
Stories tell of a man drinking 119 beers in a sitting, or 12 bottles of wine on a bus during road trips. 119 cans of beer equals about 41.6 liters of liquid. One liter of liquid weighs about one kilogram. That means, after drinking all that beer and not taking pee breaks into account, Andre would have gained just short of 92 pounds in that one sitting.