How many calories does a standard whole blood donation burn?

Fosheze@lemmy.world to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 152 points –

So I just went and donated blood again and durring the recovery period it occured to me that it takes quite a bit of work for your body to regenerate that lost blood volume and the actual blood cells. Regrowing that many cells seems like it would be fairly energetically intensive. So how many calories does producing all those new blood cells actually consume? Is there even a way to know that?

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I've always been under the belief it's a day's worth of calories.

Considering a day's worth of calories varies by person and that the general recommendation is 2,000 calories per day for an average, active adult I would question this idea

We have 10-ish units of blood in our body. When we donate we give one unit. A unit is around 500ml. Someone else on the thread says 650 cal per donation. That means each ml of blood takes 1.3 calories to make. Work harder you lazy bastards! I didn't make you out of butter to pump like this!

Then wouldn't it make sense to not put an actual figure down for how much donating is actually freeing up?