The vitamin and mineral industry is worth over $37 billion so there are a lot of people making a lot of money out there off of chewable vitamin C and calcium supplements. We want to believe we can keep a healthy balance of all the elements we need to live proper, healthy lives, but just how much of every element do we have inside of us, anyway? Turns out we have a surprising amount of the most basic of elements that, out of context, really put just how remarkable a human body is in perspective.
10. The 3 to 5 Grams of Iron
“Iron helps us play,” according to The Simpsons, and we all know you can get iron from liver and spinach and such, even if we don’t all know why it’s important. For the record, iron is an integral part of hemoglobin in your blood, which allows red blood cells to carry oxygen through your body. Not enough iron means you become anemic and will find yourself tired, easily out of breath and weak.
The average adult has as much as 3 to 5 grams of iron in their body at any given time, which works out to 3,000 to 5,000 milligrams. This is somewhat ironic considering how iron toxicity works. Too much iron can make you sick or even kill you which is why iron supplements warn about taking too much. Iron toxicity can set in which a dose as low as 60 milligrams per kilograms of body weight, and by 120 mg/kg it can be considered lethal.
North Americans have the highest average body mass at about 80 kilograms, while it’s 60 kilograms in Asia. That means a lethal dose of iron could range between 7,200 mg to 9,600 while a toxic dose would be half that at 3,600 to 4,800. And that means the average human has enough iron inside of them, at 3,000 mg to 5,000 mg, to cause iron toxicity in someone else. Let that be a lesson to any cannibals out there.
In more practical terms, if you want to put that iron to use, it’s potentially worth knowing that your average nail weighs 0.79 grams and contains 97% iron if it’s made of steel. So about 0.76 grams per nail which means you could maybe make 6.5 nails out of a human’s iron content.
9. The 10% by Mass of Hydrogen
By mass a human is just under 10% hydrogen. Most of that is caught up in water and other chemical compounds, of course, we’re not just walking bags of flammable gas by any means. But if it was gas, then what could you do with it? If it’s 10% by mass, then for a 150-pound person that’s 15 pounds of hydrogen. If you convert mass of hydrogen in pounds to volume of hydrogen in cubic feet, then 15 pounds of the stuff works out to a pretty impressive 2,868 cubic feet. But what does that mean?
Hydrogen was used for airships back in the day because it offers better lift than even helium. Yes, it’s also highly flammable and explosive which is why they stopped using it, too. But hydrogen offers 68 pounds of lift per 1,000 cubic feet of gas. That means 2,868 cubic feet of hydrogen that you can find in a 150-pound person has enough lift to get 195 pounds off the ground. So you have enough hydrogen in your own body to fly away. Theoretically, anyway.
8. 140 Grams of Sulfur
Sulfur is not the sort of element people tend to seek out very often, you don’t see a lot of sulfur-boosting recipes advertised as health food by any means, but you do have 140 grams of it in your body at any given time. Sulfur is actually important for building and maintaining DNA and therefore fighting against some cancers.
Sulfur is maybe most famous for the smell it produces, said to be reminiscent of rotten eggs. That’s because eggs contain a good amount of sulfur, about 50 milligrams in the white and another 25 milligrams in the yolk. That makes a total of 75 milligrams per egg, and if a human has 140 grams, or 140,000 milligrams, you’re carting around the sulfuric equivalent of 1,867 eggs.
In terms of what else sulfur can be used for, we can stay on the farm near the chicken eggs and look at the crops. Sulfur can be used as a pesticide and on the low end of the scale you need 10 pounds to cover an acre of farmland to protect it from pests. At 454 grams in a pound, and 43,560 square feet in an acre, you have enough sulfur to treat about 1,452 square feet of crops.
7. 200 Grams of Sodium
We’ve likely all heard the dangers of a high sodium diet and know that we should watch our salt intake, just to be safe. It would be very rare for someone to be sodium deficient but you do need a certain amount to help with nerve impulses and muscle use. A 50 kilogram person has about 200 grams, or 40 teaspoons of salt in their body. How much salt is that?
Based on the nutritional information Lays provides, you could salt 147 eight ounce bags of regular potato chips with that much sodium. If you’re more of a fast food fan, then you could season an impressive 198 Big Macs from McDonalds.
Of course, that’s a 50 kilogram person, which is about 110 pounds, and as we already saw, the average American is 80 kilograms – which means most people have closer to 320 grams of sodium, or 64 teaspoons. That bumps you up to 235 bags of Lays, or 317 Big Macs.
6. 4 Grams of Sugar.
Okay, so this isn’t an element, but we covered salt so why not look at sugar. It’s also a vital part of maintaining health. The average person has about four grams of sugar in their blood at any given time. It’s kind of remarkable that it’s so low since glucose is what your cells use for energy, but that goes to show how efficient your body is at using energy.
Consider how much sugar a person consumes in a day and this number becomes much more impressive. A can of Coke, for instance, has 39 grams of sugar, nearly ten times what your body has in it at any given time. You’d need three cups of Cheerios to get that much sugar.
5. 0.2 mg of Gold
Who wouldn’t like a little more gold? The value fluctuates from day to day but a gram of gold averages around $50 USD per gram these days. That means a mg of gold is worth about a nickel. And right now, as a living, breathing human, you have 0.2 milligrams of gold inside of you which is worth around a penny. That’s actually slightly more than the gold you’ll find inside a cell phone which contains 0.034 grams and people harvest those for gold all the time.
The small amount of gold inside of you plays a part in joint health and also for transmitting electrical signals.
A standard gold bar, those bricks you see in movies stacked up in bank vaults, is called a Good Delivery bar and they weigh 400 troy ounces or about 12.4414 kg. That’s 12,441,400 mg. At 0.2 mg of gold per person, you could make your own Good Delivery bar if you harvested the gold from 62,207,000 people.
4. 1% of Your Weight That is Phosphorus
Phosphorus is another one of those chemicals that can be very dangerous but we still need a small amount to survive and be healthy. By weight, we are about 1% phosphorus so that 150-pound person has 1.5 pounds, or 680 grams, of phosphorus in them and an 80 kilogram person will have 800 grams, or 1.77 pounds. You need it for cell growth and maintenance, as well as to produce DNA. Ironically, white phosphorus can be fatal at 50 to 100 milligrams, which is obviously a lot less than what you already have in you.
Back in the day, yellow phosphorus was applied to strike anywhere matches at a weight of 1 milligram-per-match head. That works out to 680,000 to 800,000 match heads if you harvested all the phosphorus in a human body.
3. 95 Grams of Chlorine
Chlorine is not the sort of thing you ever want to put into your body on its own,but you do need some of it as part of other chemical compounds. At any given time you have around 95 grams of chlorine inside of you. It’s in blood, bone and tissue and you get it into your body thanks to sodium chloride which is better known as salt.
The most common use for chlorine outside of a human body is in the form of bleach, but bleach is only a diluted solution. In fact, bleach is only 5.25% chlorine and one gallon equals about 3,785.41 grams. This measurement is for water, so our numbers will be a little wonky here based on density, but it should be in the ballpark.
At 5.25%, that means a gallon of bleach contains about 198 grams of pure chlorine in it. Based on a body having 95 grams, you have just about enough chlorine in you to make half a bottle of bleach.
2. 16 kg of Carbon
When it comes to the bulk of a person, after oxygen you’re chiefly made up of carbon. Just under 23% of you is carbon and for an 80 kilogram human, that means a bulky 16 kilograms of it in total. One of the most common uses for carbon in day-to-day life is in pencils which use carbon in graphite form. Even the wood in a pencil contains carbon, slightly more than the graphite in fact. This changes from pencil brand to pencil brand but at least one kind of pencil has been calculated to have 3.17 grams of carbon per pencil.
If you were so inclined to donate your own body for the greater good of pencils in the future, you’d have donated the equivalent of 5,047 pencil’s worth of carbon.
1. 1 kg of Calcium
You need calcium for your bones and teeth, a thing we’ve all been told since we were very small. Milk is the most common source for calcium for many of us, and as mammals we’re more or less designed to take milk as our chief food source from birth.
Your body is around 1.5% calcium so an 80 kilogram person devotes about one kilogram of that to pure calcium. An eight ounce glass of milk has just 300 milligrams of calcium in it, which means you’d need to drink just over three to get your 1,000-milligram daily requirement. But it also means you’re walking around with roughly 3,333 glasses of milk’s worth of calcium in you already.
If you’re not big on milk and prefer some processed cheese, a slice of Velveeta, labeled as a good source of calcium, has 160 milligrams in it. That means your body has the equivalent of 6,250 Velveeta slices on board.