Chapter 7, Problem 32P

Food calories. The food calorie, equal to 4186 J, is a measure of how much energy is released when food is metabolized by the body. A certain brand of fruit-and-cereal bar contains 140 food calories per bar. (a) If a 65 kg hiker eats one of these bars, how high a mountain must he climb to “work off” the calories, assuming that all the food energy goes only into increasing gravitational potential energy? (b) If, as is typical, only 20% of the food calories go into mechanical energy, what would be the answer to part (a)? (Note: In this and all other problems, we are assuming that 100% of the food calories that are eaten are absorbed and used by the body. This is actually not true. A person’s “metabolic efficiency” is the percentage of calories eaten that are actually used; the rest are eliminated by the body. Metabolic efficiency varies considerably from person to person.)