What am I made of ?

[venta]

Now, according to my highly approximate calculatons, a pint of blood is about half a kilo. That means I have around 4 kilos of blood in me, ie less than a tenth of my body weight. (I think, I don't really do kilos).

So, roughly speaking, what percentage of my weight is where ? How much do my bones weigh ? Internal organs ? Muscles ? Anyone have any idea of how I could work this out ?

(I should add that this is merely curiosity, triggered by having just been to blood donors'. I'm not considering a radical weight-loss strategy or anything :)

Comments

[wimble.livejournal.com]

Know anybody qualified for autopsies?

(Failing that, I've got some kitchen scales, and a Dremmel. He he...)

[thegreenman.livejournal.com]

I wonder how much is marmite...

Leading questions.

[wimble.livejournal.com]

But marmite is evil.

How could it coexist with ventary goodness.

(I sense an explosion test a-coming ;-)

Re: Leading questions.

[thegreenman.livejournal.com]

Sounds like you haven't seen her eating breakfast then.

[wimble.livejournal.com]

I have, but not on occasions when condensed evil was in the vicinity (condensed bounciness, on the other hand...)

Ah, I know: maybe she's really a giant size kidney, filtering all that raw badness out.

[wimble.livejournal.com]

Which, now I think about it, would explain her ability to take the piss.

[leathellin.livejournal.com]

Sugar and spice and all things nice. (So no marmite).
The 70% water statistic makes me twitch. Grr, misused statistics...

[beckyc.livejournal.com]

Well, I've got a pudding stomach that must weigh a good few kilos - have you got one of these?

[addedentry.livejournal.com]

Try pages 3-6 of this paper (PDF, sorry):

http://www.irpa.net/irpa10/cdrom/00602.pdf

You'll have to do the maths yourself for percentages.

[uitlander]

I could say 'its nearly an armful', but you wouldn't thank me, would you. Especially not after I bottled out this morning (and my arms do still ache from last week's rendez-vous with nurse Dracula).

[uitlander]

Actually, I could be a bit more helpful. Archaeologists use 'live weights' and 'dead weights' when talking about exploiting animals (a delightful euphamism for chopping 'em up and going munchy-munchy). Anyway, both are gross approximations - a live weight is based on what the 'average weight' for a particular species would be in the wild (cue dramatic sound ICNN red books and the like). The 'dead weight' is the cumulative weight of all the potentially edible bits - and by convention is taken to be half the 'live weight'. So this would predominantly be the bones, but not the marrow etc.

Pseudo-science, great, innit?

[cuthbertcross.livejournal.com]

If you really wanted to know what you weighed, then you *could* (if you were rich and daft enough to waste the money) get a whole-body CT or MRI scan done in America, which would map the size of each organ. You could then use average density of tissues to calculate just how much your kidneys weighed. I think I've got a pathology book somewhere at home that lists average organ weights if you're interested... It's one level of interest below the "glands you never knew you had" section!