by Lonny J. Brown
Do you take your body for granted? Actually, if you can, that's a healthy sign that it's working just fine, and not making any uncomfortable demands on your awareness. Your body has evolved according to an ingenious three million year-old blueprint to function automatically and constantly under a variety of circumstances, with a minimum of conscious attention. It efficiently assimilates food and eliminates waste, deftly cools and warms itself as conditions require, and silently monitors and repairs thousands of components, even as you obliviously go about your business. How miraculous that all this can happen on its own, without the slightest effort on your part!
But sometimes ignoring our bodies can lead to neglect and abuse, which in turn cause illness and disease. Perhaps a little more appreciation would lead to better self-care, or help us heal when things do go out of order. Why not take a few moments of your busy day, and read the following amazing facts about that marvel of functional design, your body. Perhaps your renewed appreciation will motivate you to make better choices on behalf of your faithful vehicle, and help insure many more years of productive, trouble-free service.
Your body is made up of approximately 100 trillion individual cells.
Your brain has ten billion nerve cells, and over a trillion different electrical circuits. The number of possible interconnections is ten with eight hundred zeros after it. This is eight times the number of atoms in the universe!
Your brain, many times more complex than the most advanced computers, operates on the amount of electrical power that would light a 10-watt bulb.
Think you know the back of your hand pretty well? Just a 3/4-inch square patch of skin, only one-twentieth of an inch thick contains: 9 feet of blood vessels, 600 pain sensors, 300 sweat glands, 9000 nerve endings, 36 heat sensors, and 75 pressure sensors.
The combined pulling strength of all the muscles in your body equals 25 tons.
Your body secretes more than seven quarts of digestive juices a day.
Your ears can discriminate among more than 300,000 tones. Factory noise is one million times as loud as a soft whisper.
Your eyes can distinguish nearly eight million differences in colors.
The surface area of your lungs is 1,000 square feet - 20 times greater than the surface area of your skin.
Your bones manufacture one billion new red blood cells every day, replacing old ones at the rate of two and one-half million per second.
Your blood serum is almost identical in chemical content to sea water.
All the blood vessels in your circulatory system total nearly 70 thousand miles in length.
Your heart will pump about 2.5 billion beats in your lifetime.
Every pound of excess fat You carry requires an extra 200 miles of capillaries.
Your digestive tract is 30 feet long.
One cubic inch of your bone can withstand a two-ton force.
There are more bacteria living on and in your body than there are people on the earth. Most of them are benign and even beneficial: You on intestinal bacteria to help you digest your food.