Ok, I admit it. The title is a bit of click-bait, but it is indeed accurate…kind of.

While there are many factors that go into your weight and overall health, everything can be simplified to calories in, calories out (kind of). So, when people are trying to bulk up and gain weight, they often look for foods that contain a lot of calories, but what if they looked to things beyond traditional foods?

Well, before getting to that, it is important to understand what a calorie actually is. While it is most commonly associated with foods, it is actually a measurement of how much energy something contains. Terezie Tolar-Peterson, who is an Associate Professor of Food Science, Nutrition & Health Promotion at Mississippi State University explains this in The Conversation:

“In the late 1800s, chemist W.O. Atwater and his colleagues devised a system to figure out how much energy – that is, how many calories – various foods contain. Basically, he burned up food samples and recorded how much energy they released in the form of heat. A calorie is a calorie is a calorie, at least from a thermodynamic standpoint. It’s defined as the amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of 1 kilogram of water by 1 degree Celsius (2.2 pounds by 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit).”

With this understanding, you might be tempted to look for something that has a huge amount of calories, and that search may lead you to uranium. Yes, the material that is used to power nuclear power plants.

Well, before you continue, let’s make it clear. This is not a good idea. Eating uranium would not provide you vast amounts of usable calories.

In fact, it would likely provide you with a one way ticket to your grave.

That being said, it is possible to determine how many calories it has. There are multiple types of uranium, but for this calculation we will look at uranium-235, which is the type that is used for sustained nuclear reactions.

Without getting into the math behind it, if your body were able to pull out all the energy contained in a single gram of uranium-235, it would get 19,605,984,734 calories (if you want an actual comparison to normal foods, it would actually be 19.6 million Calories since Calories (with a capital food) listed on food labels are actually kilocalories).

That’s enough energy to keep you moving for a very long time.

One (of many) big problems with the idea of eating a gram of uranium-235 is that humans did not evolve to have particle accelerators in our stomachs, so there is no way we can bombard that gram of uranium-235 with enough neutrons to get all the energy out of it.

So, if you want to pack on the pounds, you’ll have to look to other high-calorie things. Maybe stick to actual foods.

That is an insane amount of energy.

If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about a quantum computer simulation that has “reversed time” and physics may never be the same.