Imagine this: You’re trapped on a desert island. You’ve eaten nothing for 20 days and as you grow increasingly delirious, your friend who is also stuck in this godforsaken place begins to look appetizing... which part of the body should you eat first?
According to a bizarre paper
published in Scientific Reports, consuming body fat will give you the most calories. But the thighs are a good option too – much better than the brain, torso or liver.
Dr James Cole, a Senior Lecturer in Archaeology at The University of Brighton in the UK, studied the nutritional value of human cannibalism by measuring the levels of fat and muscle in four adult male corpses. To convert this into calories, Cole used the ratio conversion 4:4:9, where 1 gram of protein or carbohydrate equals 4 calories and 1 gram of fat equals 9 calories.
Don’t worry, there is scientific merit behind this investigation. By analyzing the nutritional value of human bodies, it could help answer the question of why our ancestors, Homo habilis, were motivated to consume one another during the Paleolithic era, which began 2.6 million years ago.
“Human cannibalism is a subject that continues to hold a morbid fascination within modern societies. In particular, identifying the motivations for human cannibalism remains a contentious issue. In modern humans, the motivations for cannibalism have been related to any combination of the following: survival; psychotic or criminal; aggressive; spiritual or ritual; gastronomic or dietary; and medicinal,” the paper’s abstract reads.
Well then, let’s see how nutritious the human body is compared to other animals, Cole thought. It turns out that a 65-kg (143-lb) human has approximately 32,000 calories in their muscle tissue compared to 163,000 calories in the muscle tissue of a deer and roughly 3.6 million calories for the muscle tissue of a mammoth.
