Welcome to brain Stuff from how Stuff Works dot com where smart happens. This podcast is brought to you by go to Meeting, the best way to hold meetings over the Internet readings, travel expenses, save time. Just hold an online meeting with go to Meeting. Try it free, is it go to meeting dot com slash brain Stuff. Hi, I'm Marshall brain with today's question, how much oxygen does a person consume in a day? The average adult at rest inhales and exhales something like seven or eight liters
of air per minute. Think about a two liter soda bottle. Every minute you're inhaling and exhaling about four of those. That totals something like eleven thousand liters of error in a day. The air that is inhaled is about oxygen, and the air that's exhaled is about fift oxygen, So about five of the volume of air is consumed in each breath and convert of the carbon dioxide. Therefore, a human being uses about five fifty liters of pure oxygen or nineteen or so cubic feet of pure oxygen per day.
A person who's exercising obviously uses a lot more oxygen than that. You can determine how much air is moving through your lungs by exhaling into a plastic bag of known volume at each breath and seeing how long it takes to fill the bag. Do you have any ideas or suggestions for this podcast? If so, please send me an email at podcast at how stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, go to how stuff works dot com.