I excerpted the following from an email I received today from an MD..
Sometimes you may feel (or know, like me!) like your body is beginning to creak and fail you on the outside, but have you ever stopped to consider the incredible work going on inside? What is, is pretty miraculous!
1. Your heart pumps around 2000 gallons (7571 liters) through its chambers each day. To accomplish this, it beats 100,000 times a day.
2. You take around 17, 00 breaths a day and you don’t even think about it. You can hold your breath to stop breathing but eventually your brain takes over autonomously and you have to take a breath.
3. Did you know your body gets rid of thousands of potential cancer- causing cells a day? Cancer cells are formed when their DNA is altered and this happens tens of thousands of times a day. But there are enzymes in each cell which essentially inspect each new strand of DNA and fix the errors before the cells lead to a tumor.
4. It’s estimated that 50-60,000 thought run through your brain every day, 35-48 thoughts a minute.
5. Some of the cells lining your stomach produce acid strong enough to dissolve metal, but in reality just digest your food into a substance called chime. Why doesn’t your stomach digest itself? Because other cells produce an alkaline substance to neutralize the acid.
7. Most of your body’s energy is given off as heat during the day. You produce about as much heat at 25 light bulbs (the incandescent kind).
8. A red blood cell can make a complete circuit of your body in less than 60 seconds! Pretty fast! So it makes it around 1440 times a day, delivering oxygen to the cells and picking but the carbon dioxide. The cell lives for about 40 days before breaking down and being replaced by a new cell.
Are you impressed yet? There’s more…
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Your hair (assuming you have any) grows a half millimeter a day. If you have a full head of hair (about 100,000 hairs), you grow 50 meters of hair every single day!
10. You shed about 1 million skin cells a day, but your skin doesn’t get thinner (except as you age) because those cells are constantly replaced by new cells coming from layers beneath them. You skin is actually your largest organ (yes, an organ) with a area of 18 square feet (about 2 square meters).
11. Our brain runs our mouth and larynx to allow us to speak around 5,000 words a day, unless you are a teacher and/or a woman. Men only speak around 2000 words a day, Duh! Research says that only 500-700 of these words are constructive and useful, i.e. contain relevant information. I’m sure there will be some blowback from women on this – I’m not sure I trust this data.
12. Your liver is so busy, it’s nearly impossible to summarize all that it does. It manufactures blood plasma, Vitamin D and cholesterol (which is necessary in some amount), it stores nutrients, and filters 1.53 quarts of blood every minute and produces about a quart of bile for food digestion. And that’s just a few things.
13. Your salivary glands produce about 1.5 liters of saliva every day, in order to keep your oral cavity moist, inhibit bacterial growth and begin the digestion of food.
14. 
The average man’s testicles produce over1 million sperm cells a day – what overkill, right? Those that aren’t used eventually break down and are resorbed.
15. Each of your kidneys contain about 1 million tiny filters called nephrons that together filter 2.2 pints of blood each minute. That’s 3168 pints a day, but only about 2.5 pints are expelled as urine because the nephron resorbs water.  
There’s lots more, but I don’t want to overawe you!
A very interesting post
Thanks, John. Aren’t we amazing?
Too late! I am overawed … I knew our bodies were amazing pieces of kit, but in detail it’s simply amazing!
I studied the body for my whole career and I am still in awe of how it works!
I LOVED this post!!
#4 was no surprise to ME – lol. I sometimes think I could add a few zeros to those numbers. 🙂
#7 explains why people huddled together are able to warm each other in cold environments.
#8 recalls a comment I heard from a scientist who likened the white and red blood cells in our vessels to a freeway without lines keeping the cars in their own lanes.
#12 – cholesterol is essential for brain health – unfairly maligned for many years
I am now ready for more awe. I hope you are planning to share it.
xx,
mgh
(Madelyn Griffith-Haynie – ADDandSoMuchMORE dot com)
ADD Coach Training Field founder; ADD Coaching co-founder
“It takes a village to educate a world!”
Yup, the only ;pileups with the blood cells is sickle cell anemia.
Isn’t medical science fascinating?
xx, mgh
Goodness! We seem to look like a kind of industrial area inside! Does that involve pollution as well? I knew a lot of it, but not the figures! Just came out of a shower and examined my body – old lady – and the hidden activities did not show. It just goes on and it is only when you feel unwell or sick, when your stomach aches or you have to go to a doctor to test your heart or another of these clever “centers” that you realize their existence and use. Everything seems so obvious!
Thank you for this post. Made me a little more thankful to heart and brains, a little more humble or unpretentious. We are all made of “THAT”!
You are most welcome. Whenever I remember all these amazing things, my belief in a higher being is reinforced.
Wow! Highly interesting. I’m especially blown away by the number of thoughts rambling around in the brain. No wonder there are times I feel like I can’t contain them all, LOL!
It explains why sometimes I can’t sleep at night because I can’t get my brain to quiet down!
It is amazing, isn’t it? We are miracles. The info on words was pretty funny.
I do believe in miracles – I just hope we don’t tinker with it too much!
Agreed!
Now I can run around like Cliff Claven and spout off these wonderful factoids about our bodies! 😀
Have fun with that, Ms. Claven!
I had more than 50-60,000 thoughts run through my brain when I read number 14!
All those potential offspring, just wasted!!
Fascinating piece, Noelle. But as many as 500-700 words actually have meaning? I’d say, in my case, more like 50, if I’m feeling awake!
Aw, I know you have more than 50 – look at all those posts on using interesting words!!!
By the way, one of my favorite words is syzygy. No vowels!
And a few definitions! Most of them, rarely used. I shall have to try to find a place for it in my scifi novel!
This is so gross and so incredible. I knew some of this (actually a lot of it — my kids love these types of books with factoids in them) but it’s great to be reminded how amazing our bodies are and all they do for us. And to TAKE CARE OF THEM! 😉
That’s the ticket – taking care of them!!!