First, let’s get the boring part out of the way. A pound of sugar is exactly 16 ounces by weight. But if you’re measuring by volume—like you do when you’re baking a cake at 2 a.m.—that’s roughly 2 cups of granulated white sugar. Yes, two cups. That’s enough to turn a small swimming pool into a giant Slurpee.
Now, the fun part: calories. One pound of sugar contains about 1,740 calories. That’s almost an entire day’s worth of energy for an average adult, all packed into a single, innocent-looking bag. If you ate that whole pound in one sitting—please don’t—you’d have the energy to run a marathon, but you’d also probably die from a sugar coma before you hit mile one.
