How DOES Santa do it?
It’s pretty impressive that Santa visits every household in the world in one night (although one night is technically about 31 hours long, given the earths’ rotation and the length of nights in December). Old Saint Nicholas must have some fast reindeer.
Heck, even if Olentzero covers Northern Spain for him, Ded Moroz takes care of most of the Slavic countries, and the Befana do the delivering around Italy, we’re impressed. Doing the United States, alone, is quite a feat.
But here’s the mysterious question from those of us in the dental community. How does he take care of his teeth so well? Especially given his diet.
There are 132 million households in the USA alone. If Santa Claus visits all those houses and even one-third of them are kind enough to leave out a plate with, say, two cookies on it, Santa will have eaten 88 million coookies in one night.
Good thing there’s calcium in that milk.
But that’s an awful lot of sugar. A Chips Ahoy cookie (a little over an inch across) contains 11 grams of surgar. An average large cookie, like the kind you can buy at a bakery or make at home (about three inches across), often contains as much as 40 or 50 grams of sugar. Although there’s a lot of room for variation in recipes and portion sizes, let’s assume that the average plate of cookies for Santa has about 50 grams of sugar in it.
That means Santa’s teeth are chomping down on 2.2 million kilograms (one million pounds) of sugar in one night in the USA alone.
Denchers? No way. If Santa’s real and the beard’s real, then his teeth have got to be real, too. All we can say is that It’s magic! Hopefully his elf Hermey became a dentist, because Santa sure could use one after a night like that.
