this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2025
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Friendly neighborhood microbiologist here. You're right except for one thing: most cells can use sugar directly through anaerobic respiration. Mitochondria facilitate aerobic respiration, which utilizes oxygen and is far more efficient, albeit a bit slower, and produces carbon dioxide as its end product.
Fun fact: ever wonder where your weight goes when you lose weight? CO2. You literally breathe most of it out.
I can get as nerdy as you want if anyone has any questions.
Edit: another cool one! Part of the process that regenerates ATP from ADP is ATP synthase. Look it up! It's literally a little biological waterwheel that utilizes a chemical gradient, established by the mitochondria, to smoosh ADP (adenosine DIphosphate) and a phosphate back together into ATP (adenosine TRIphosphate).
Maybe the way you do it. I lost 5 pounds this morning, you wouldn't want to breathe.
On that (brown) note: most of the solid part of shit is actually (dead) gut bacteria, not food waste
This is why partially why fiber helps with bulking and pooping. Fiber is "fiber" because it's made of things we can't digest, but our gut microbes can. One of the byproducts of their utilizing it is SCFAs, short chain fatty acids. These confer various benefits like reduced inflammation and enhanced mucous production, which helps you drop a deuce.
Feeding your microbes also means you grow more of them, which makes your turds bigger and easier for your intestines to push along.
Yet another fun fact: ruminants like cows ferment otherwise indigestible plant matter in their guts, breaking it down and growing absolutely huge quantities of microbes in the process. Then they digest those microbes. That's how they get enough protein. A cow is a mooing, shitting house of horrors if you're a microbe.
Well tough guy, this morning was an oatmeal surprise swirl, with carrots, two inches above the waterline. In a Crane Galaxy #3251D701100, you do the math.
BRB. Hyperventillating to test a theory....
(Going to assume this just results in a smaller quantity of calories processed per breath before anyone get's all sciencey on me.)
It's too hard to try to manually control a fast breath rate like that. What you want to do is to naturally push that up by doing a bunch of physical work so that you're breathing heavily. Then you'll be exhaling lots of carbon dioxide!
What would happen if I got ATP injected directly in the blood stream? And what about the stomach? Skin?
Depending on the concentration, it would hurt as it's a bit of an acid, plus ATP outside of the cell is one of the mechanisms that drives inflammation, but it won't give you extra energy or anything.
ATP is used to transfer energy more than store it, more like a wire than a battery. The average adult has about 250g of ATP in their body (for my fellow Americans: about one rather chunky hamster) but it's recycled about 200 times a day, so would require 50kg (6 watermelons or two average labradoodles) if it was used and discarded.
ATP has been around since the beginning of life or near enough, and evolution is a deranged, cat-piss-soaked hoarder that makes use of whatever is already lying around, so ATP also does several things beyond energy transfer. This also means where ATP is allowed and in what quantity is fairly controlled. To that end, there's a class of enzyme called ectonucleotidases that's found on the outside of cells. One of the things it does is keep the level of circulating ATP and things like it low, so whatever was injected would get chopped up pretty quick.