Mateo Jarquin
Leaving cookies for Santa on Christmas Eve is a tradition as old as time. But with all the houses he visits on Christmas, and the amount of cookies people leave out every year, how much more of this can he actually take? Well, I have been requested by the elves to find the answer to this burning question using science! Let's break down Santa’s diet and find out exactly what foods Santa actually needs in order to optimize his energy levels for Christmas Eve!
Details to Consider
I think it's pretty obvious that cookies and milk CANNOT be the best food for old Father Christmas. While analyzing the nutritional contents of your average cookies, I have come to the conclusion that an average household will contain about 100 calories in cookies just sitting on a plate, waiting for Santa to stop by. But in order to tell if Santa can truly sustain this, we need to know what kind of exercise he undergoes from house to house. Upon interviewing Mr. Claus, he would continue to say, “The Christmas spirit guides my path!” While inspiring, it doesn’t exactly answer my question. Therefore, I’m going to assume he takes a quick jog from house to house. With the exception of traveling across countries because Santa already has a first-class private sleigh!
Calculating the Calories
In order to make our rough calculations, I’m going to assume the distance between each house is about 10 feet, or 3 meters. Using census data from all over the world we can deduce that there are about 2.3 billion houses that Santa Claus needs to visit. Meaning that he needs to jog approximately 6,900,000,000 meters. Since the average person burns approximately 100 calories per mile, we can say that Santa would burn about 0.05 calories per meter of jogging. Meaning that in total, Santa would have burned 345 million calories in a single night! However, knowing the calories of cookies, being around 100 per household, Santa will not even be close to burning that many calories, considering we’d need to multiply the 100 calories by the 2.3 billion houses he visits. Taking that into account, subtracting the calories of Santa’s jogging, from the calories of cookies, we are left with a total of 229,655,000,000 calories in one night!
Unaccounted Factors
All of the calculations performed were all done not even considering the fact that each household usually offers a glass of milk to wash the cookies down. Now, milk contains A LOT of calcium and other nutrients which are usually quite good for keeping your body alive. However, as is the case with anything. Too much of it can harm you. In fact research in Sweden has indicated that it only takes three or more glasses of milk before it can take harmful effects. Knowing this, I immediately rushed into Santa's workshop to find his elf doctor! Upon talking to him about Santa’s wellbeing, he only said, “I don’t know how the jolly fella does it every year!”
What Should Santa Eat Instead?
Between Santa’s questionable health situation and his overpaid doctor, I’m starting to think that this may be some type of elaborate prank! Orchestrated by the elves in order to get me to admit that it’s impossible. But I’m not going to give up so easily!
Using a calorie calculator, it can be assumed that good ol’ Santa Claus needs about 3275 calories a day. Assuming that on Christmas Eve, he eats nothing but the cookies people leave out, we know that whatever food it is, subtracted by whatever exercise he does, has to equal about 3275 calories in total.
Here is the equation to solve to find Santa’s “Superfood”:
(Number of Houses Serving Food x Number of Calories of Superfood) - Number of Calories Burned = 3275
(2.3 billion houses x # of Calories) - 345 million calories = 3275
Then we solve for the number of calories of “Superfood”
(2.3 billion houses x # of Calories) - 345 million calories = 3275
(2.3 billion houses x # of Calories) = 345003275
# of calories = 0.150001424
# of calories ≈ 0.15
This means that whatever food we leave out for Santa, needs to amount to 0.15 calories in total. This means that we actually have quite a few options! Food considerations include: 5 grams of lettuce, a small radish or a 5 gram stick of celery. Alternatively, for those who are interested in keeping it traditional, you can always leave Santa 0.15% of a cookie on a plate. Oh, and forget about the glass of milk!
Granted, we won't be leaving Santa very much food individually, but at least we can all rest easy on Christmas Eve knowing that Santa is finally on the right diet!
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