I was browsing through the USDA Food Search system for data on various foods, when I noticed they include how much of a food is water. What really perplexed me is how 81.1 grams out of 100g of russet potato is water… when 88.1g of 100g of milk is also stated as water.
Obviously a potato isn’t liquid like milk, and my intuition would say that 100g of potatoes seem far denser and “drier” than 100g of milk. I mean can you imagine sating your thirst with just solid potatoes, as opposed to say a glass of milk?
But yet I can’t make sense of why one is solid and the other is liquid when they’re nearly the same in water content, or why one would seem to sate thirst more.
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Bonus question: does this mean you poop about as much from 100g of milk as you would from 100g of, potatoes? I guess you could blend the potatoes…
In: 7
Terms like “solid” and “liquid” start to make less sense when you’re describing objects or (formerly) living beings made up of a bunch of different materials. A potato is solid in that all its bits are stuck together. But, like all living things, a potato is made up of cells. And cells are basically tiny little water balloons. Is a (filled-up) water balloon liquid or solid? What about a big cardboard box full of water balloons? You see the problem. A box full of water balloons is a solid structure, but it’s still more than 90% water.
As for quenching your thirst: yes, a raw potato would provide 80 grams of water per 100 grams. Your body doesn’t really care where the water comes from (unless it’s mixed in with a lot of salt, which will drain water out of your body). What may be tripping you up though is that you don’t eat potatoes raw, so the potatoes you’re familiar with have been cooked and thus lost a lot of their water content. A raw potato is similar in texture to a raw apple, and you’ll definitely feel it releasing that lovely potato juice when you eat it.
As for pooping: what you poop out is indigestible waste products. Potatoes contain plant fiber that our bodies cannot digest, which ends up in your poop. Milk contains almost no indigestible components, so you don’t really poop any of it out. You end up peeing out the water and the rest gets absorbed into your body (eventually you will poop out some of the components as cells die and/or create waste products that originally came from the milk you drank, but that’s much later).
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