Casting Fire from Food

[Ignis]

So, according to some Pignite's Pokedex entries, it has the ability to convert the food it eats into the energy necessary to create fire internally (Fennekin is very similar, but it eats twigs and sticks instead of actual food). I'm currently designing a tribe of mages with the ability to control heat and fire and I want to come up with a reasonable explanation (reasonable as in, grounded in science) as to how they can create fire internally. I'm thinking maybe they could adopt a similar trait to Pignite and convert the food they eat into the fuel needed to start the fire. This would most likely be done by having the mage telekinetically induce enough heat into the fat tissue in their bodies to the point of ignition, and then employing a similar force to sever the flames from the fat before it burns up completely (this part about psychically controlling fire that isn't attached to its fuel source is the only aspect of my idea that doesn't follow real world science and can therefore be ignored when answering my question). At which point, the mage guides the flame through the body in a way that leaves their insides unscaved until it escapes outside through the pores in the mage's body (will escape through the hand for a flamethrower/fire blast-styled attack, and will escape everywhere at once for a shockwave-like attack).

Now here's the thing. I'm terrible at biology, and I'm only slightly better at science, so I have no idea how to identify the flaws of this idea, or the modifications needed to make it sound. This is why I would be extremely grateful if any of you guys and girls could potentially help me out and tell me the things about this explanation for generating fire internally that work and don't work. Now obviously, if there's something important I'm missing about this idea of mine that completely diminishes it's value, by all means, please tell me, but assuming it's scientifically sound, there's a few things I need to know. Specifically...

- Would I need to give my mages the secondary power of heat and flame resistance in order to make this idea work?
- Assuming my mages had the same amount of fat in their bodies as the average human being, how long would it take for them to literally burn through all their fat (assuming they spent a fairly long time in battle casting flamethrowers and fireballs)? Also how long would it take to build it back up again if they ever ran out?
- What will happen to my mages once they run out of fat to cast from? Will they just straight up kick the bucket, or will they just feel really weak and tired and have to spend the next few days building up their strength again?
- Since my mages are literally burning fat to create their fire, will they lose so much weight during battle that it becomes noticeable?
- What kind of diet would work well with this idea? Also, I like to keep my mages looking and feeling fairly healthy so what kind of exercise should my mages do in order to stay healthy enough to get by (they're not super muscularly or anything like that, but they're far from chubby or fat), without (figuratively) burning so much body fat that they're useless in a fight?
- What effects will my mages undergo when burning fat in their body? I don't know what happens to fat tissue when it's set ablaze, but assuming it emits gas during the combustion process, will that have any nasty effects on the mage's body? Also what obstacles in the mage's body will they have to overcome in order to guide the fire from their fat to their hands?

Thanks in advance btw. I happy to have joined this forum

 

[K.S. Crooks]

About 40% of the food we eat is converted into useable energy for movement and other body functions. 60% is turned into heat, most of which we radiate out. Your mages could convert some of this 60% into their fire magic. Even stored fat must go through cellular respiration to become usable energy.

 

[Ignis]

About 40% of the food we eat is converted into useable energy for movement and other body functions. 60% is turned into heat, most of which we radiate out. Your mages could convert some of this 60% into their fire magic. Even stored fat must go through cellular respiration to become usable energy.

Huh, that's interesting. So my mages will always have backup energy to draw from even when they've used up most of their current supply, but they won't be able to tap into that backup energy until several hours later. That makes sense.

 

[Rosemary Tea]

So, your mages are burning calories. Literally. That's what "calorie" means: heat unit.

They must have to eat a lot.

 

[Ignis]

So, your mages are burning calories. Literally. That's what "calorie" means: heat unit.

They must have to eat a lot.

Well... yeah. I guess they would need to eat a lot of food in order to convert it into fire. What I wanna know though is how much food is that exactly? I REALLY don't wanna design my mages to look chubby but I've never heard of a high-fat diet in my life that yielded a positive result. There's also the issue of what kind of food the majority of their diet consists of. Again, I don't know enough about biology to work this out on my own, but do all fats (good, bad and neutral) eventually form tissue in the body when eaten and digested? I also read on a website somewhere that teenagers are able to eat large quantities of food that would make them fat if they continued to eat like that in their adulthood, so will my mages be at their strongest during their teenage years? Will those in their sixties to nineties be straight up unable to create any sort of fire at all? I'd like to know these things because if my idea turns out to be a bust, I'm just gonna end up creating a really boring, frankly cliché explanation as to how my mages can create fire internally (e.g. Chi, spirit magic, fictional energy that manifests as flame, something overdone like this).

Also sorry for the late reply. Had a busy morning. Thanks anyway though

 

[Rosemary Tea]

I'm a 45-year-old tai chi player, and when I'm in an all day tai chi workshop, I eat and eat and eat. So does everyone else, and I'm one of the youngest in the group. We come in all shapes and sizes, but eating so much during tai chi doesn't make me, or anyone I know, noticeably fatter. Tai chi moves a lot of energy. If raising fire magically were a real thing, it would burn at least as much energy as a tai chi workshop.

If magic works like tai chi does, the oldest mages would be the strongest at it. To my mind, it stands to reason that it would. The longer you've been practicing, the stronger the fire would be. Where young people are stronger is in the muscles, but this kind of exercise/energy work wouldn't engage the muscles. If anything, younger people would be at a disadvantage, because they'd try to muscle through.

 

[Ignis]

I'm a 45-year-old tai chi player, and when I'm in an all day tai chi workshop, I eat and eat and eat. So does everyone else, and I'm one of the youngest in the group. We come in all shapes and sizes, but eating so much during tai chi doesn't make me, or anyone I know, noticeably fatter. Tai chi moves a lot of energy. If raising fire magically were a real thing, it would burn at least as much energy as a tai chi workshop.

If magic works like tai chi does, the oldest mages would be the strongest at it. To my mind, it stands to reason that it would. The longer you've been practicing, the stronger the fire would be. Where young people are stronger is in the muscles, but this kind of exercise/energy work wouldn't engage the muscles. If anything, younger people would be at a disadvantage, because they'd try to muscle through.

So... what you're saying is, my idea is not only plausible (minus the part about telekinetically controlling fire separated from its fuel source), but all of my mages, young and old, will be able to create a fair amount of fire for battle and still be healthy enough to get by?

 

[Rosemary Tea]

So... what you're saying is, my idea is not only plausible (minus the part about telekinetically controlling fire separated from its fuel source), but all of my mages, young and old, will be able to create a fair amount of fire for battle and still be healthy enough to get by?

Yes, as long as they maintain their health. Which they very well could if the way their magic works is similar to chi raising. If they're practicing some sort of exercise along the lines of tai chi/chi gung, and practicing it consistently, they'd likely be healthier than the average person their age, and the difference would be especially marked the older they are.

 

[Ignis]

Yes, as long as they maintain their health. Which they very well could if the way their magic works is similar to chi raising. If they're practicing some sort of exercise along the lines of tai chi/chi gung, and practicing it consistently, they'd likely be healthier than the average person their age, and the difference would be especially marked the older they are.

As far as exercise is concerned, they tend to do a lot of hunting, walking, yoga/stretching, sword fighting (actually, just weapon duels in general) and even fire duels ala The Last Airbender. Don't suppose any of these would yield the same result as Tai Chi?

 

[Rosemary Tea]

Yoga would have similar results, health-wise.

 

[Ignis]

Yoga would have similar results, health-wise.

Amazing. Thank you so much for all your help.

 

[Chasejxyz]

Oh this melding of topics is RIGHT up my alley, I would love to help

First we need to establish: what is fire? It is the process of atomic bonds being broken down/changed, which releases their energy. The flame is the visible part, but it's a lot of air/gases moving, too, plus solid by-products (soot/smoke/ash). Bonds being changed is the root of...well pretty much everything! It's why there's both those hand warmer things and ones that can turn cold, it's why glow sticks work, and why you exist. Your body is constantly Krebs Cycle-ing, which includes the ATP cycle, so it's breaking down stuff from food and adding oxygen to put energy into ATP (like a battery) which is then unleashed later so your cells can do whatever. Different cells turn the raw materials into stuff to do specific tasks (dietary iron gets turned into hemoglobin for your red blood cells etc).

What you're proposing would just be another cellular process. Just like your car, many chemical reactions need an "ignition" or a catalyst to be present for the chemical change process to begin. This flame will be that catalyst, as it'll "ignite" the material to do magic. This can be incredibly tiny, the smallest ember can turn into a massive wildfire if the conditions are right (it's dry, there's oxygen, there's stuff to burn). Things like drowning, oxygen loss and regular dying could snuff out this fire and rob your mages of their magic (forever? maybe there's a way to re-start it, would be a good reason to go on an adventure). Your stomach is full of hydrochloric acid which is incredibly nasty but it doesnt eat your stomach from the inside-out because it's got a special lining/mucuses to keep that from happening, because evolution. Depending on how you want the real deep lore to be, this flame holding pouch could be a gift (or curse) from a powerful being, a random mutation, an intentional addition (like WH40K stuff), or magic living parasitically inside a human host (or maybe it's a living thing that gives off magic so it's a symbiotic relationship){I only mention this because I really really want to write a story about magic parasites and I think other people should explore it, too}.


For your Qs:
1: depending on how big/energetic you want that fire to be, yeah. But they should already have some resistence if they're working with fire a lot, or at least things like no arm hair/singed eyebrows/lots of old burn scars
2: A pound of fat is roughly 3,500 (food) calories (since we're actually working with energy we need to make that difference). People who have more testosterone (T) than estrogen (E) are going to have low body fat %, while people with more E than T will have higher body fat %. 1 food calorie = ~4,000 Joules. A watt (like a light bulb) is 1 joule/second, and this states that a candle is 80 watts, so 80 joules per second. So 1 pound of fat will burn a candle-sized flame for 175,000 seconds, or ~48.6 hours
3: This is something I touch on in my manuscript. When your body needs energy, it first goes to fat (which is just stored energy), and as time goes on it will consume muscles and organs, too. Re-gaining fat is very easy, as you do not get more fat cells, the ones you have stretch out, which is why so many people gain all their weight back once they stop a diet. Re-building muslce takes an extremely long time, and depending on the organ, you're never going to repair those. The liver is quite amazing in how many functions it does and how much it can grow back (and it's even more amazing that alcohol can destroy it so utterly, because it is such a powerful poison we put into ourselves all the time). Depending on how your magic system works they could choose which organs/muscles they're drawing energy from, so things like reproductive organs are pretty safe to cannabalize but never the brain or heart. (tho if you totally destroy your sex hormone producing organs then you're gonna go straight into menopause/osteoperosis, no matter what your biological sex is)(but if you weaken/destroy your thyroid, your metabolism goes down, so you will gain/retain body fat easier, which might be ideal for these guys)
4: Maybe, you'll have to look at the math in this post, plus you can fudge some things if you want. Maybe they eat a big meal before battle and they draw on that before body fat, people with more T tend to have belly/"internal" fat, which hides your six pack but isnt super noticable, while people with more E tend to store fat in the breats/hips/thighs, which tend to be more noticable. Look up pictures of people of the same height but different weights/hormone profiles and you'll see what I'm talking about. But if they're wearing a lot of clothes/armor then I don't think many people are going to notice boobs suddenly deflating lol
5: The only way to have a super low body fat percentage is to have an incredibly harsh, unhealthy diet (or have hormones that are out of whack). I have been chronicly underweight for most of my life, and I've had doctors tell me everything from "drink milkshakes" to "just eat a whole thing of peanutbutter" to gain weight lol. At the end of the day, a calorie is a calorie and your body won't care if it's from a crate of oranges or a big mac, but energy-dense foods will give you more calories (and hopefully nutrients) than ones that don't. Fats, obviously, have a very high calories/gram, and alcohol is up there, too (hence why it's so flammable). Protein is half as much as fat, but it's the same as carbohydrates, too. But sugar is a carb and that's put in everything in American food which is why they're usually considered "bad." You can look up "healthy ways to gain weight" and you'll get lists of things like nut butters, avocados etc. Unless your mages only eat chicken nuggets and french fries, they're going to get vitamins/minerals from a varied diet and be okay.
6: I think this is the part where you have to say "it's magic don't worry about it." The basis of my magic is ATP, which is just cells doin' stuff, so when you heal someone, the various cells use ATP like normal to fight infections/repair itself, but how exactly does one psychicly control that? What happens to all the dead/used up leukocytes? Don't worry about it. There is no way to make a 100% factually accurate magic system, becaus magic, by its mere existence, is breaking some rules of science. You also have to take into account how much of this will go onto the page. A lot of what I've written here is going to shape what these mage's cultures, diets, and rituals might be like, how it feels to use magic, how they think about using magic, but there's never going to be exact numbers being thrown around. It's possible these people don't have an advanced understanding of anatomy so they can give a spirtual/mythological explanation for this; it covers your butt for not coming up with the exact mechanics and the reader will just think That's How Magic Is and be cool with it.

Oh no this is Really Long I hope that helps but I'd be glad to clarify stuff or give more info

 

[S.T. Ockenner]

becaus magic, by its mere existence, is breaking some rules of science

Well...it depends. Technically, magic is somewhat scientifically plausible, on a small scale that is, if you look into quantum physics. The movement of energy. But I see your point- imagined magic absolutely does not have to be 100% scientifically plausible, or even 1% ! I would love to see a magic system that deliberately breaks every rule of science constantly, and eventually overtakes it, causing the world to go into a chaotic, ever-changing realm with no rules.

 

[Ignis]

Oh this melding of topics is RIGHT up my alley, I would love to help

First we need to establish: what is fire? It is the process of atomic bonds being broken down/changed, which releases their energy. The flame is the visible part, but it's a lot of air/gases moving, too, plus solid by-products (soot/smoke/ash). Bonds being changed is the root of...well pretty much everything! It's why there's both those hand warmer things and ones that can turn cold, it's why glow sticks work, and why you exist. Your body is constantly Krebs Cycle-ing, which includes the ATP cycle, so it's breaking down stuff from food and adding oxygen to put energy into ATP (like a battery) which is then unleashed later so your cells can do whatever. Different cells turn the raw materials into stuff to do specific tasks (dietary iron gets turned into hemoglobin for your red blood cells etc).

What you're proposing would just be another cellular process. Just like your car, many chemical reactions need an "ignition" or a catalyst to be present for the chemical change process to begin. This flame will be that catalyst, as it'll "ignite" the material to do magic. This can be incredibly tiny, the smallest ember can turn into a massive wildfire if the conditions are right (it's dry, there's oxygen, there's stuff to burn). Things like drowning, oxygen loss and regular dying could snuff out this fire and rob your mages of their magic (forever? maybe there's a way to re-start it, would be a good reason to go on an adventure). Your stomach is full of hydrochloric acid which is incredibly nasty but it doesnt eat your stomach from the inside-out because it's got a special lining/mucuses to keep that from happening, because evolution. Depending on how you want the real deep lore to be, this flame holding pouch could be a gift (or curse) from a powerful being, a random mutation, an intentional addition (like WH40K stuff), or magic living parasitically inside a human host (or maybe it's a living thing that gives off magic so it's a symbiotic relationship){I only mention this because I really really want to write a story about magic parasites and I think other people should explore it, too}.


For your Qs:
1: depending on how big/energetic you want that fire to be, yeah. But they should already have some resistence if they're working with fire a lot, or at least things like no arm hair/singed eyebrows/lots of old burn scars
2: A pound of fat is roughly 3,500 (food) calories (since we're actually working with energy we need to make that difference). People who have more testosterone (T) than estrogen (E) are going to have low body fat %, while people with more E than T will have higher body fat %. 1 food calorie = ~4,000 Joules. A watt (like a light bulb) is 1 joule/second, and this states that a candle is 80 watts, so 80 joules per second. So 1 pound of fat will burn a candle-sized flame for 175,000 seconds, or ~48.6 hours
3: This is something I touch on in my manuscript. When your body needs energy, it first goes to fat (which is just stored energy), and as time goes on it will consume muscles and organs, too. Re-gaining fat is very easy, as you do not get more fat cells, the ones you have stretch out, which is why so many people gain all their weight back once they stop a diet. Re-building muslce takes an extremely long time, and depending on the organ, you're never going to repair those. The liver is quite amazing in how many functions it does and how much it can grow back (and it's even more amazing that alcohol can destroy it so utterly, because it is such a powerful poison we put into ourselves all the time). Depending on how your magic system works they could choose which organs/muscles they're drawing energy from, so things like reproductive organs are pretty safe to cannabalize but never the brain or heart. (tho if you totally destroy your sex hormone producing organs then you're gonna go straight into menopause/osteoperosis, no matter what your biological sex is)(but if you weaken/destroy your thyroid, your metabolism goes down, so you will gain/retain body fat easier, which might be ideal for these guys)
4: Maybe, you'll have to look at the math in this post, plus you can fudge some things if you want. Maybe they eat a big meal before battle and they draw on that before body fat, people with more T tend to have belly/"internal" fat, which hides your six pack but isnt super noticable, while people with more E tend to store fat in the breats/hips/thighs, which tend to be more noticable. Look up pictures of people of the same height but different weights/hormone profiles and you'll see what I'm talking about. But if they're wearing a lot of clothes/armor then I don't think many people are going to notice boobs suddenly deflating lol
5: The only way to have a super low body fat percentage is to have an incredibly harsh, unhealthy diet (or have hormones that are out of whack). I have been chronicly underweight for most of my life, and I've had doctors tell me everything from "drink milkshakes" to "just eat a whole thing of peanutbutter" to gain weight lol. At the end of the day, a calorie is a calorie and your body won't care if it's from a crate of oranges or a big mac, but energy-dense foods will give you more calories (and hopefully nutrients) than ones that don't. Fats, obviously, have a very high calories/gram, and alcohol is up there, too (hence why it's so flammable). Protein is half as much as fat, but it's the same as carbohydrates, too. But sugar is a carb and that's put in everything in American food which is why they're usually considered "bad." You can look up "healthy ways to gain weight" and you'll get lists of things like nut butters, avocados etc. Unless your mages only eat chicken nuggets and french fries, they're going to get vitamins/minerals from a varied diet and be okay.
6: I think this is the part where you have to say "it's magic don't worry about it." The basis of my magic is ATP, which is just cells doin' stuff, so when you heal someone, the various cells use ATP like normal to fight infections/repair itself, but how exactly does one psychicly control that? What happens to all the dead/used up leukocytes? Don't worry about it. There is no way to make a 100% factually accurate magic system, becaus magic, by its mere existence, is breaking some rules of science. You also have to take into account how much of this will go onto the page. A lot of what I've written here is going to shape what these mage's cultures, diets, and rituals might be like, how it feels to use magic, how they think about using magic, but there's never going to be exact numbers being thrown around. It's possible these people don't have an advanced understanding of anatomy so they can give a spirtual/mythological explanation for this; it covers your butt for not coming up with the exact mechanics and the reader will just think That's How Magic Is and be cool with it.

Oh no this is Really Long I hope that helps but I'd be glad to clarify stuff or give more info

Hello

First of all, you don't need to apologize for making a long post just to answer my questions. If anything, I find this pool of information you've given me extremely helpful, as it helps me iron out the kinks in my magic system.

My mages ability to control fire and heat is one that was obtained from an object filled with elemental power. I like the idea of mutations and body inhabiting parasites but those concepts feel more at home in a tech heavy/sci-fi kind of game, and I'm going for something more along the lines of a Legend of Zelda styled world/setting (granted BotW and Age of Calamity did place a fairly heavy emphasis on ancient technology and stuff such as malice and the blight ganons could be interrupted as parasites of sorts).

As stated in my question, I don't know a lot about biology, but if weakening/destroying my thyroid results in gaining and retaining body fat more effectively, wouldn't that mean getting rid of it would be much, much harder?

Don't worry. Chicken nuggets and French fries don't even exist in my world. My mages have a fairly balanced diet all things considered.

In regards to the sixth point you made. Yes, I agree with you that there simply isn't a way to make my explanation as to how my mages can create fire internally 100% scientifically sound, and I am beyond content with breaking a rule or two. The purpose of that question was to find out what kind of hand wavy-like explanation I would need to come up with in order to avoid the issue of the insides of my mages burning out during the combustion of their fat. Again, I haven't the foggiest clue what exactly would happen to someone if their internal fat suddenly caught on fire (other than they would die if they didn't put it out in time), but if the properties released from the burning fat have the potential to reek havoc within my mages bodies, I'll then be able to create a decent sounding explanation as to how those properties have null effect on my mages innards (or how my mages will be able to combat them). In other, more simplified words, I wanna know what harmful properties come from igniting fat tissue so I know what exactly it is that I'm handwaving (sorry if this is inherently confusing btw, I don't how to explain this in a way that's simple and to the point).

Thanks though for the other bits of information you shared with me. I appreciate it greatly

 

[Ignis]

Well...it depends. Technically, magic is somewhat scientifically plausible, on a small scale that is, if you look into quantum physics. The movement of energy. But I see your point- imagined magic absolutely does not have to be 100% scientifically plausible, or even 1% ! I would love to see a magic system that deliberately breaks every rule of science constantly, and eventually overtakes it, causing the world to go into a chaotic, ever-changing realm with no rules.

I mean, I guess it would largely depend on what your definition of 'magic' is and what the rules and physical laws of each fictional universe is, but if you're looking for a piece of entertainment that couldn't care less about real world science and physics, the Super Mario franchise is pretty close (don't know about ever changing chaos though).

 

[S.T. Ockenner]

I mean, I guess it would largely depend on what your definition of 'magic' is and what the rules and physical laws of each fictional universe is, but if you're looking for a piece of entertainment that couldn't care less about real world science and physics, the Super Mario franchise is pretty close (don't know about ever changing chaos though).

Not quite what I meant. I was thinking more along the lines of random people exploding for no reason, dogs flying through the air and peeing on people, people taking other people's arms and attaching them to their own bodies, and someone climbing up a wall with their head while their feet sneeze.

 

[Ignis]

Not quite what I meant. I was thinking more along the lines of random people exploding for no reason, dogs flying through the air and peeing on people, people taking other people's arms and attaching them to their own bodies, and someone climbing up a wall with their head while their feet sneeze.

Oh. Well in that case, I dunno (how would such a world even be able to sustain itself?).

 

[S.T. Ockenner]

Oh. Well in that case, I dunno (how would such a world even be able to sustain itself?).

An octopus would hold the world in place and shoot sunlight from its eyes.

 

[Ignis]

An octopus would hold the world in place and shoot sunlight from its eyes.

I honestly don't know whether this world you're describing would make for a better movie or a better video game, but if it actually existed, I would love to watch/buy and play it.

 

[Queshire]

Hm~ I rather like the idea of chubby pyromancers. Shame you said that you're not going that route. Even then you might want to take inspiration from the sort of training and food that sumo wrestlers use. Despite how often they're treated as a joke they treat things really seriously over there.