Your Amazing Body
by Linda Tremer  

Most of us don’t realize how amazing our bodies are and how hard they work. Most of the work our body does is performed without our conscious control. Did you know that the heart beats about 70 times a minute? That’s almost 40 million times a year. Each minute about 1.5 gallons of blood is pumped through the body. (What’s that per day?)

Our bladders can hold around 18 ounces of urine. But for most of us it never get that full as the urge to urinate is felt when capacity reaches from 8 to 12 ounces.

Did you know the average person has about 60,000 miles of blood vessels inside his body? The distance across the United States, via the Canadian border, is approximately 5,000 miles. Thus our blood vessels would stretch across and back six times. It’s amazing they all fit inside of us.

The small intestine is about four times your height, unless you are a basketball player. Measurements show it to be between 18 and 23 feet long. It fits because it is coiled back and forth inside our abdomen.

At birth we start with 350 bones. As we grow, some bones fuse together and we end up with only 206.

Our lungs rival our heart for the prize of doing the most work. We breathe 500 milliliters (about a pint) of air per inspiration (inhalation). At rest we take 16 breaths a minute, thus breathing 8 liters of air per minute. If you were paid one dollar for every breath you took in a day you would be about $23,040 richer each day.   

It’s a good thing our bodies do all this work unconsciously. If we had to remember to tell the lungs to breathe and the heart to pump blood we wouldn’t have time to do anything else. For more information on your amazing body, check out an anatomy book at your local library.

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