Folk Measures

I’m a big fan of the metric system, mainly because it is consistent and easy to work with, but I still find that I end up using other measures for sanity sakes: miles for distances (which our roads are still measured in) or inches for clothes sizes (although I have a sneaking suspicion that many clothes manufacturers choose to either scrimp or flatter their clientele).  However, there are many folk measures in use which are possibly useful for rule of thumb comparisons and that maybe should be more accurately defined.

One of the commonly used ones is the size of Belgium. A Belgium is 30,528 km2 which makes it approximately  1.5 Waleses, 80 Isle of Wights or 4,275,000 football pitches. The Empire State Building is 449 metres high which is in itself over 4 Big Bens, 8 Nelson Columns or around 100 double decker buses . Similarly, weight often refers to elephants, 6 family cars (at least 1980’s ones) or 6,000 bags of sugar (for those too dim to work out that a bag of sugar is 1Kg).

There are also some odd ones. When I used to go to a gym on a regular basis I devised a system to grade aerobic workouts which was the Mars Bar scale. This was determined due to most of the aerobic workout machines being calibrated to show the total energy expired during the workout and a Mars Bar at the time containing roughly 250 kcals (1,000 kJoules) of energy. Hence a moderate workout could be a 1 Marsbar routine whereas an hour and a half flat out could hit the 4 or 5 Marsbar level. An interesting aside to this is that the exercise was only of any real benefit if one did not consume the Mars Bars afterwards.

Recently, I’ve noticed an interesting unit of measure in the media which is a universal unit of unhealthy food. This unit is the BigMac and refers to comparisons to McDonald’s iconic signature hamburger. For reference a BigMac can refer to 508 kcal of energy, 25g of fat (of which 9.5g are saturates) 43g of carbohydrates (of which 9g are sugars) or 2.3g of salt and, I suppose, could also include 3.6g of fibre and 26g of protein although the latter two are probably quite good for you.

The upshot of this is that newspapers and TV documentary makers can come up with such shocking things as tomato soup or a cottage pie containing more salt than a BigMac. Sandwiches contain more sugar than a BigMac and even more surprising is that many packaged salads (you know – the health things that we are meant to eat five of a day) contain more fat than a BigMac. Of course, I could just play Devil’s Advocate with this one and suggest that, on its own, a Big Mac isn’t anything like as unhealthy as its reputation would suggest?