This page is called I’m A Useless Info Junkie so i guess it’s needless to explain the title of this post. But have you ever really wondered how many calories would Santa consume by eating cookies and drinking milk at every house he visits?
Well, because we would certainly love to know the answer to this question, we did a small research to find out.
Here are our findings. (the article continues after the ad)
By using this List of countries by number of households, we noticed that there are 1,586,012,165 households in the world. However, not every country in the world celebrates Christmas therefore, we needed to find the Christian households. Thanks to the CIA, we can now easily determine populations by religion from the comfort of our couch.
By going through all the countries and adjusting the number of households to the number of Christians, we were able to find the exact number of Christian households. For example, even though China has 455,940,000 households, only 5.1% of China’s population are Christians – therefore the number of Chinese Christian households is approximately 22,797,000. For countries in which the Christians were more than 80% of the general population, we used the entire number of country’s households as we made the assumption that the Christmas tradition should be so strong, that people should be celebrating Christmas in that country regardless of their religion.
By doing so for every country, we calculated that the total number of Christian households in the world is 676,326,870 – a figure that makes sense as it’s 42.6% of the total household population (Christians are about 33.51% of the world population but with the assumptions we made above we expected our number to be greater than 33.51%).
Of course, not every house has kids so we used this handy CIA list that lists populations by age. We assumed that Santa Claus would only visit houses with children of 0-14 years of age. That brings us to the final number: because around 17% of the households had children of that age range, Santa would have to visit (just) 114,975,568 houses.
If each house were to leave for Santa cookies and milk, and if Santa were to eat only one cookie and drink half a cup (118 ml) of milk, based on the average calories per cookies and milk, Santa would have consumed 110 calories per visit. That being said, stopping the sleigh and going down the chimney at every house should burn some calories, so we estimated a generous 20 calories burn at each house.
That means that he would have consumed 90 calories per house and a whopping 10,347,801,105 calories for the whole trip!
Since 3,500 calories make up 1 pound, that means that Santa would have gained 2,956,515 pounds or 1,343,870 Kg!
So, now you know, you knowledge-thirst, useless information junkie!
If you like what you read, then you will definitely love this one: Why Do We Say ‘Merry Christmas’ Instead Of ‘Happy Christmas’?
Photo: wavebreakmedia / Shutterstock (License Download ID: modestinos)
Sources: List of countries by number of households | The World Fact Book: RELIGIONS | The World Fact Book: AGE
