mouchefska:briarin:I would never need to eat againYou wouldn’t. It’s true. A (dietary) Calorie is a
mouchefska:briarin:I would never need to eat againYou wouldn’t. It’s true. A (dietary) Calorie is a unit of energy, and also a unit of energy accessible to the body. A (thermochemical) calorie is a different, smaller unit of energy, which no one uses because everyone who wants to talk about that sort of energy scale uses joules instead. If a gram of uranium has 20 billion thermochemical calories, it has 20 million dietary Calories in the just-plain-energy sense. Uranium has zero dietary Calories in the accessible-energy sense because your body has no enzymes to get energy out of uranium.Uranium isn’t nearly as radioactive as people think it is. If you started eating uranium, you’d reach fatal levels of heavy metal toxicity before you reached fatal levels of radiation exposure. Don’t eat uranium. A few grams will poison you just like lead would, and you already know eating lead is stupid. But it’s not going to jump up and bite you if you aren’t actively trying to win a Darwin award. And though you really shouldn’t test this, you could probably eat a gram of uranium and survive, especially if the uranium was in a single piece and you were a big person. -- source link