this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2025
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In the US, we weigh ourselves in pounds. But nutritional information about food is in grams.
Imo, the fact that the numerator and denominator units are incompatible isn't a big deal since the message "eat .08% percent of your body weight in protein each day" is not the intuitive way to think about how much to eat. It's much easier to use a unit in the numerator that is common measuring nutrition and a unit in the denominator that is common for measuring body weight.
My question is essentially as to why you use two systems at once
If you know what gram is, you can imagine a kilogram as well: the conversion is easy, measurements are consistent with each other and the entire world, and it makes it very clear both units are tied together and represent mass.
Same reason we know what a liter is but still use pints and gallons. Because we recognize the value of the easy precision of metric when it's needed but prefer imperial for our day to day lives.
It's not actually that intuitive when you don't use kilograms. An American might know what a gram is, but mentally multiplying the conception of one gram by 1000, it's hard to imagine. You really need experience with kilograms to understand kilograms.
As an analogy, say you don't know Fahrenheit. I can tell you that 32 °F is the freezing point of water, and 100 °F is a really hot day. Is 300 °F the right temperature to cook chicken at? In theory, you can mentally extrapolate, but in reality it's hard to say without direct experience with Fahrenheit in cooking (it's not right, it's too cold).
I see your point, thanks!
~~but seriously, go metric already, nearly an entire world managed to~~ (light-hearted)
I agree! My country is so fucked because we're caught between metric and American units. Worse than just Imperial.