In a typical winter day with low temperatures does eating a ice cream make your body temp go lower than their calories can heat after being absorbed by the body?

Question

Supposing a normal outside temperature and eating an ice cream at -6°C with 30g of carbs and 15g of fat, will the calories given after the nutrients has been absorbed be enought to rise the body temperature to the normal values (36.5°C) after the ice cream has been eated? Or you will need extra calories to heat yourself up. We’re supossing the outside temperature doesn’t really affect yourself in the process.

In: Biology

Answer 1

Let’s see. 30g of carbs and 15g of fat is about 255 kcal or 1.1*10^6 J of energy.

Assuming this ice cream weighs 1kg which is certainly a high estimate, it would take 1kg * 334000J/kg to melt it (assuming same properties as water) and 1kg * 4186 J/kgK * (6+36.5)K to heat it up to your body temp. The total is 5.1*10^5 J of heat lost to the ice cream.

This ice cream would give you about twice as much thermal energy from its calories as it sucks up by being cold and frozen. In reality, 255kcal of ice cream would be much less than one kg I’m pretty sure so it’s safe to say it will always end up providing more heat than it takes.

Answer 2

You didn’t include the key information of how much mass of ice cream you have, nor what the thermal properties are (e.g. specific heat of the ice cream in different phases)

With that said 255 calories could raise the temperature of two+ liters of water from 0 to 100. So it would seem unlikely that 255 calories couldn’t melt a reasonable amount (~100 grams) of ice cream from -6 to 37.

Answer 3

Ice cream has a lot of calories. While a few will be used to heat it up, you still gain a lot more from eating it regardless of the temperature outside.