astounding !

great site. this is so interesting to me and i love reading poop stories

300 mill * 72% = 206 mill. But what's 10 million people more or less? That's only approximately equal to the "best estimate" of the number of illegal aliens in the country.

Call me Didactic Poo.
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Deja Poo - Because this shit's so strange, it couldn't ever have happened before.

Can I die now? It is 216 mill. I should have used my calculator instead of my head (which is currently stuffed full of snot from a head cold), but I left it on the top of toilet tank this morning.
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Deja Poo - Because this shit's so strange, it couldn't ever have happened before.

300*.72 = 216. Unless my calculator is broken...

Interesting stuff, Dave

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(insert ziggy boogy doog here)

Does that mean INS can deport the illegal shit?Will there be an amnesty program for all the poop in Quantico? Will Bono launch SOS(Save Our Shit)International? If the illegal turds are allowed to stay will there be enough shitty jobs for them?

BTW peeps 200 mill is not 200 million I forget what it is but it isnt millions.
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The Thunderous Crapper 63 Enjoying home toilet advantage since 2004!

I've often wondered about things like this myself. Except it's usually something along the lines of "I wonder how much of the weight of the ocean is poop."

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It's YOUR cat, YOU get his poop out of my sink!

"How much poop does America flush?"
All of it I hope.

There's been something bothering me about the numbers. The 100-300 grams number seems far too small. The whole Conservation of Mass issue comes into play here. Remember that, assuming your weight is more-or-less stable, every gram you ingest (whether it's fluid or solid) is going to come out of you. There are only six really relevant ways to lose body mass: pooping, peeing, vomiting, sweating, breathing and sloughing (skin and hair). Of course, you could lose an arm, have an organ removed or donate blood but these are uncommon events for our purposes.

Looking at that list of five, vomiting is also an unusual situation and, unless you're pretty ill, not a daily event. I don't know how much you slough everyday but, unless your molting or some such thing, I don't suppose that's such a large amount everyday either. Sweating could be an issue and I'm not sure what that figure would be, but I don't think it's particularly relevant for our purposes since sweat is mostly water. That would seem to leave peeing and pooping as your primary means of eliminating your daily intake.

This leads us to the next question about our digestive tracts. In short, it transforms food and drink into pee and poop while extracting the body's needs and depositing the body's wastes. On the other hand, soup is food as is cereal, but these are mostly fluids. Maybe we should change our reference point on our intake from food and drink to solids and fluids. The question is, to what extent can your body transform solids to liquids and vice versa.

I'm going to make a large leap here. I'm going to wager that, by weight, your daily urine, sweat and your breath moisture output are approximately equal to your daily liquid intake and that your daily sloughing and fecal output is, accordingly, approximately equal to your solid intake. If this is the case, in order to figure out your average poop mass by looking at your average food intake.

If you eat like I do, your poop has got to be more than 1 lb per day, because I know that I consume more than 1 lb of solids per day. While I don't know the exact mass, I can say that lunch tends to average a little more than a 1 lb because I usually eat at one of these buffet bars in our office building where they charge by the pound. My daily bill is usually the equivalent of 1.25 lbs, assuming that the weight of the styrofoam container is negligible. Add on to that, breakfast, dinner and snacks and I'm betting that I'm consuming a good 2.5 - 3.0 lbs per day.

(And don't assume that I'm some fat bastard either. I'm a very svelte 200 lbs at 5'10" -- and managed to lose a significant amount of weight over the last two years.)

Omigawd. I just realized that, if my assumptions are true. That foot of cable I'm laying everyday has got to be 2.5 to 3.0 lbs everyday. I'm squeezing out the equivalent of ten (countem!) Quarter Pounders (weight before cooking) from my ass everyday. Jeez, my poop doesn't look that large. Sure, it's impressive and, sometimes when it's inside of me, it feels much larger. But coiled up at the bottom of the bowl, it just doesn't seem that large.

Which leads to a couple of other conclusions about our droppings. While Conservation of Mass is, Conservation of Volume and Conservation of Time is/are not. That is, by weight input equals out, but by displacement, the number of cubic meters of solids consumed is probably not and certainly crapping as often as you're eating. That may be why it seems so hard to believe that you're shitting out the equivalent of your breakfast, lunch and dinner. You may eat 2 or more times per day (excluding snacks), but you probably only pinch a loaf once per day. Unless you're an avid reader or very constipated, I doubt that you spend as much time on the toilet as you do at the dinner table.

So, to make a long story short, it seems to me that if you want a really want to know just how full of shit Americans really are, just figure out how many thousands or millions of tons of food we consume everyday. In any case, I'm betting that it's a shitload.

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Deja Poo - Because this shit's so strange, it couldn't ever have happened before.

DP -- first off, I must commend you on your elaborate and well-rationalized essay. Unfortunately I have to summarily dismiss it as based on a faulty premise.

"Remember that, assuming your weight is more-or-less stable, every gram you ingest (whether it's fluid or solid) is going to come out of you."

You forget the main purpose of digestion: turning food into energy for your body. Protein, fat, and carbohydrate are converted into energy. That which it can't convert to energy is secreted as waste (along with water, bacteria, dead cells, fiber, and so on). That which it can use is expended by your body in the form of muscle movement and so on.

I think. Now that we're getting into physics, I guess there is the law of conservation of mass. Can mass be converted into energy? Aside from E=MC2, which probably doesn't apply.

Mass does have an energy equivalence. That's what the E=MC2 function expresses. However, the formula relates energy at the atomic level, not the molecular. Your body, however, doesn't so much change atoms as it changes molecules, which are composed of atoms. While molecules contain a whole lot of energy, they pale in comparison to the amount of energy contained within an atom.

Even if the body were converting atoms into energy, the whole mass-energy equivalence formula seems to indicated that we don't convert a significant amount of mass. One gram of mass contains the energy equivalent of most small nuclear weapons. Another way of thinking of this is that the E=MC2 equation reflects the amount of energy stored within the atom. However most chemical processes don't change atoms; they change molecules. Burning gasoline (or using sugar) only decomposes the Hydrocarbon configurations into water, carbon dioxide or carbon monoxide and a couple of other nasty molecules (like sulfuric acid or ferric oxide) depending on the type of impurities in the fuel.

Consider some of the best known atomic reactions: fission and fusion. These reactions convert a very small amount of explosive into a very large amount of energy, primarily because of the specific amounts of energy stored within the atomic configuration. Even still, most of the explosive material remains. Only a very small portion of matter is actually converted into energy. Also, the primary explosive material in these weapons are atoms, not molecules: Hydrogen (and its isotopes Deuterium and Tritium) and Uranium (primarily, Plutonium). In fact, these reactions are measured in terms of kiltons of a molecule Trinitrotulene, or TNT.

I think, then, that the body is not doing atomic conversion on a large scale with food. It's doing mostly molecular conversions. Because if the body were doing atomic conversions, I could probably eat a couple of grams of food and that would last me a lifetime.

And, if that were the case, then I could eat a block of lead and maybe crap a brick of gold.
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Deja Poo - Because this shit's so strange, it couldn't ever have happened before.

Having thought more about this: we don't eat to poop. We eat to create energy, and poop is the byproduct. If you were to go for a couple weeks without eating, you'd obviously lose a lot of weight. That implies that the energy our bodies use comes from the mass of our bodies. So food adds mass that your body burns off as energy. If you have a steady input of food and a steady output of energy, your body maintains weight at an equilibrium, even though it poops out less than it takes in.

This is further underscored by the fact that fat is stored energy. Your body will burn it off when there is no food input.

Science. I like Science. Excellent post and thread.

Hey, lets do world poopulation,at post time its
6707881852

I think I need to meet deja poo and dave.Their posts are incredible.(smart dudes, i need to stalk them)

I wonder how many ears of corn are in that 13.5 million pounds.
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.....hugging bunnies since 1969
www.daphneszoo.com

We need some consenus here on the average density of poop. Given an average of 250 grams/day, what is the equivalent volume? I am going to make an observational guesstimation of about 1000 mL per shit( about 4 cups). this equates to an average density of 250kg/meter cubed.
Anyone else out there composting their "humanure"?

"Smoke that shit"

A large part of your food intake consists of water...imagine drying your food out completely. There will not be a whole lot left.

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One Turd to rule them all
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i commend u folks on the thought yall put into this. i can truely say that its one huge load of shit, per day i mean.

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oh man, i feel soo much better. i think i lost a few pounds... dont even think about going in there for at least 20-30 minutes. dont worry, i left the fan on.

Another thing to consider, some people's poop is denser than others.

Consider the weight of a floater vs. the weight of a sinker. At best, the scientists can likely only produce an educated guess.

Though our diets mostly consist of water, some people can absorb more, while others absorb less. Weather is probably a factor as well, as well as occupation (the sweat factor).

In summary, there are so many variables to poop weight, that it would take intense study, as well as lots of time, money, and people to get an accurate figure.

I think if it makes a big splash an almost flushes itself down its gotta be close to a pound at least.