Anne Dunev, PhD CN – Burbank CA Nutritionist and Holistic Doctor
Most people know more about the their favorite sports team or the latest celebrity news than they do about how their own body works. The word “doctor” comes from the Latin “docere”, which means to teach. But how many doctors have the time or inclination to teach us what we need to know to keep our body healthy?
Here are some astounding facts about your body.
There are approximately 60 to 100 trillion cells in the adult body.
Every hour approximately 1 billion cells must be replaced.
Where do dead cells go? To the kidney, to be excreted.
A human body has 60,000 miles of blood vessels.
3 million red blood cells are made in the human body every second.
One million white blood cells are made every second.
The heart pumps about 2,000 gallons of blood through those vessels every day.
The average heart beats 100,000 times per day.
The average human heart will beat 3,000 million times in its lifetime and pump 48 million gallons of blood.
There are 100,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body.
There is about 6 quarts of blood in the adult body. The blood circulates through the body three times every minute.
400 gallons of blood are pumped (and filtered) through the kidneys every day.
Each red blood cell lives an average of 120 days. The spleen is a recycling plant for red blood cells.
Laid out, all the blood vessels in the body would cover 60,000 miles.
The human heart creates enough pressure to squirt blood 30 feet.
The human body is comprised of about 75% water.
The lining of the digestive system is shed every 3 days.
The average surface of the human intestine is 656 square feet.
The heart is the strongest muscle. There are 650 muscles in the body.
It takes 30 muscles to smile and 200 muscles to take one step.
The eye blinks over 10,000,000 a year.
Your skin weighs twice as much as your brain.
The skin is about 1/20 of an inch thick.
Every square inch of the skin contains about 19,000,000 skin cells.
There are 450 hairs in the average eyebrow.
Each human tooth has about 55 canals in it.
The surface of the human skin is 25 square feet.
There are 45 miles of nerves in the human skin.
You lose enough dead skin in your lifetime to fill 8 five pound flour bags. That is 600,000 cells of skin every hour!
The human nose can remember 50,000 different scents.
During a 24-hour period, the average human will breathe 23,040 times.
Adults lungs have over 600 million tiny air sacs called aveoli.
20% of the oxygen we breathe goes to the brain.
The air from a human sneeze can travel at speeds of 100 miles per hour or more.
In a lifetime, the average person produces about 25,000 quarts of saliva — enough to fill two swimming pools!
The small intestine is 22 feet long.
Stomach acid (hydrochloric acid) is strong enough to corrode steel, but the stomach protects itself by making a new mucosa lining every three to four days.
The liver performs 500 functions in the body, including detoxifying chemicals and otherr toxins that enter through the mouth or nose.
Pound for pound a human baby is as strong as an ox.
A pair of feet have 500,000 sweat glands and can produce more than a pint of sweat a day.
There are 54 bones in each hand and wrist.
The hardest substance in the human body is tooth enamel.
The femur (thigh bone) is the strongest and longest bone in the body, and the bone itself is harder than concrete, but the femur is hollow so that it is light enough to be lifted.
The average adolescent girl has approximately 34,000 egg follicles in the ovaries.
The smallest cell in the body is the sperm cell.
Each cell in the body has its own energy plant, called the mitochondria.
It is through the circulation of the blood that each cell receives nutrients to perform its job, and to remove waste products.
Now that you know more about the body, can you see why you need a lot of nutrition for fuel, maintenance, and repair? You are the mayor of an amazing biological city, and each cell looks to you to provide it with life-giving nutrients.
If your cells could vote, would you be re-elected?