Quote from Forum Archives on January 14, 1999, 7:14 am

Posted by: tz8cy5 <tz8cy5@...>

As a senior citizen was driving down the freeway, his car phone rang.
Answering, he heard his wife's voice urgently warning him, "Herman, I
just heard on the news that there's a car going the wrong way on 280.
Please be careful!"

"Heck," said Herman, "It's not just one car. There's hundreds of them!"

As we all know, it takes 1 calorie to heat 1 gram of water 1 degree
centigrade.

Translated into meaningful terms, this means that if you eat a very cold
dessert this Christmas (generally consisting of water in large part),
the natural processes which raise the consumed dessert to body
temperature during the digestive cycle literally sucks the calories out
of the only available source: your body fat.

For example, a dessert served and eaten at near 0 degrees C (32.2 deg.
F) will in a short time be raised to the normal body temperature of 37
degrees C (98.6 deg. F). For each gram of dessert eaten, that process
takes approximately 37 calories as stated above. The average dessert
portion is 6 oz, or 168 grams. Therefore, by operation of thermodynamic
law, 6,216 calories (1 cal/gm/deg. x 37 deg. x 168 gms) are extracted
from body fat as the dessert's temperature is normalized. Allowing for
the 1,200 latent calories in the dessert, the net calorie loss is
approximately 5,000 calories.

Obviously, the more cold dessert you eat on Christmas Day, the better
off you are and the faster you will lose weight, if that is your goal.

This process works equally well when drinking milk shakes during the
college bowl season.

Each ounce of shake contains 16 latent calories, but extracts 1,036
calories (6,216 cal. per 6 oz. portion) in the temperature normalizing
process. Thus, the net calorie loss per ounce of a milkshake is 1,020
calories. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to calculate that 12,240
calories (12 oz. x 1,020 cal./oz.) are extracted from the body in the
process of drinking a glass of that creamy delight.

Frozen desserts, e.g., ice-cream cakes, are even more beneficial, since it
takes 83 cal./gm to melt them (i.e., raise them to 0 deg. C) and an
additional 37 cal./gm to further raise them to body temperature. The
results here are really remarkable, and it beats running/jogging hands
down.

Unfortunately, for those who eat pizza as an excuse to drink milkshakes, pizza
(loaded with latent calories and served above body temperature) induces
an opposite effect. But, thankfully, as the astute reader should have
already reasoned, the obvious solution is to drink a lot of shake with
pizza and follow up immediately with extra helpings of ice-cream cake.