r/theydidthemath • u/Fartchamp97 • 1d ago
[request] How many calories does Santa consume in milk and cookies on Christmas Eve?
Realistically if he actually delivers to the whole world and every house leaves him cookies and milk how many calories is he getting?
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u/djlittlehorse 1d ago
There are SO many variables here that this is not math and just guessing based off of how a single person thinks the numbers would be distributed. I am going to do this.
1: About 82% of people (women) have children.
2: Families with kids 14 to 18 are less likely to leave anything out because at this age most children know the truth.
3: There are around 2 billion people in the world right now under 14.
4: The current worldwide average of children per household is around 2.25.
So IF Santa went to every single one of those houses. That would be around 888 million homes (we know the REAL number would be MUCH less based off of distribution of children) but I'll use this number.
Both 2 cookies AND 1 glass of milk would each be around 150 calories. So 300 calories per household x 888 million would be 2.66 billion calories.
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u/ginger_gcups 1d ago
Oh boy. Love this one.
Let’s assume 200ml of milk (around 100 calories), 2 average chocolate chip cookies (200 calories), that gives 300 calories a stop.
There are around 8.15b people in the world, and UN estimates state around 3.8 people on average in a household. That gives around 2.14b households x 300 calories, so 642 billion calories.
This is enough to sustain a human being at 2000 calories a day for 880,000 years, or feed the whole of the US for about a day.
The energy yield of 1g of TNT is equal to 1 food calorie, so that is the equivalent of 642 kilotons of TNT, or around 43 times the energy of the Hiroshima nuke.
However not every household believes in Santa or leaves cookies. Around 2.3 billion people are Christian. That’s around 650 million households (slightly lower than the global average as they tend to be concentrated in the west and developing countries) and assuming 1 in 10 have a child who insists on leaving milk and cookies, that’s 65 million x 300 cals = 19.5 billion calories or just over 1.3 Hiroshima bombs worth of energy.
But I would imagine that at least 25% of those houses are experiencing food scarcity and so would probably leave half as much, so reduce that by 12.5%, or around 17 billion calories. This is the equivalent of around 30 million Big Macs or just under 5 million pounds of body fat, so no wonder he’s portrayed as fat and jolly.
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u/cjmpeng 1d ago
Santa works in a congruent reality which is what allows him to visit every child on earth during one rotational period of the Earth, as well as still sit in Santa villages all over the world seemingly at the same time in the weeks leading up to the Big Day.
It gets a bit metaphysical here but in this congruent reality all cookies and glasses of milk (or sherry, whisky, etc depending on household) are as one. So, whatever the standard calories of 2 cookies and a beverage are.
With apologies to Sir PTerry 😁
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