I read a professional magazine recently which had an article describing just how amazing our bodies are. My curiosity aroused, I then did a google search and came up with lots of amazing facts about the body, some of which I've mentioned below.
It really got me thinking about how wonderful our bodies really are and how much we take them for granted - only paying attention when things don't go right, when we should be grateful for all the things that do go right all of the time. Perhaps we should have a "Be Kind To Your Body Day" - perhaps in the same week as World Reflexology Day because Reflexology is such a great support for that amazing body. Anyway here are a few amazing facts about your body. Did you know:
* Pound for pound, bone is as strong as steel. A block of bone the size of a matchbox can support 9 tonnes – that is four times as much as concrete can support.
* Simply walking up and down stairs can place as much as six hundred pounds of pressure on the knee.
* During the act of walking, the heel makes contact with the ground at approximately 30mph and is under pressure seven times the body’s weight.
* An adult has over 600,000 sensory receptors in the skin. The fingertips are one of the most sensitive areas, with up to 50,000 nerve endings every square inch.
* An infant’s foot has twenty times the toe-grasping capacity of a shoe-wearing adult.
* Nerve messages travel to the brain at the rate of 180mph
* Our brains contain as many cells as there are stars in the universe
* An adult is made up of around 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (7 octillion) atoms.
* We have about the same number of hairs on our bodies as a chimpanzee.
* When you sit on a chair, you don't touch it. You float a tiny distance above, suspended by the repulsion between atoms because the atoms that make up matter never touch each other.
* You have more than five senses. You have heat sensors in the skin that can tell you a hot iron will burn you, without you having to touch it. You can detect pain or tell if you are upside down. Your proprioception can tell you where the parts of your body are with respect to each other.
* The stomach’s digestive acids are strong enough to dissolve zinc. Fortunately for us, the cells in the stomach lining renew so quickly that the acids don’t have time to dissolve it.
* The lungs contain over 300,000 million capillaries (tiny blood vessels). If they were laid end to end, they would stretch 2400km (1500 miles).
* Each finger and toenail takes six months to grow from base to tip.
* The largest organ in the body is the skin. In an adult man it covers about 1.9m2 (20sq ft). The skin constantly flakes away – in a lifetime each person sheds around 18kg (40 lb) of skin.
* When you sleep, you grow by about 8mm (0.3in). The next day you shrink back to your former height. The reason is that your cartilage discs are squeezed like sponges by the force of gravity when you stand or sit.
* Each kidney contains 1 million individual filters. They filter an average of around 1.3 liters (2.2 pints) of blood per minute, and expel up to 1.4 liters (2.5 pints) a day of urine.
* The focusing muscles of the eyes move around 100,000 times a day. To give your leg muscles the same workout, you would need to walk 80km (50 miles) every day. And the eyes receive approximately 90 percent of all our information, making us basically visual creatures.
* In 30 minutes, the average body gives off enough heat (combined) to bring a half gallon of water to boil.
* A single human blood cell takes only 60 seconds to make a complete circuit of the body.
