The Elegance of Our Metabolism

When you eat a food that's mostly carbohydrate, what happens is that the food goes into your stomach where it gets broken down into smaller building blocks. The only way for those carbon atoms to get back out of your body again is you have to break it all down and turn it into carbon dioxide and water which happens inside your cells. It's this exact process that we're talking about that allows scientists to measure your metabolism in the lab. In a day, if you could breathe into a bag and save all of your exhaled breath, you could then figure out precisely how much carbon you have breathed out. If there's more carbon atoms going into your digestive system, then you are exhaling