70 Amazing Facts About Your Body

In our ongoing quest for wonderful facts about all manner of things, we have put together this list, a great list of some amazing facts about your body. These are the most wonderful things about our bodies that, hopefully, are new to most of our readers:

1. Your hair is almost indestructible.
2. The brain operates on the same amount of power as a 10-watt light bulb.
3. The brain is much more active at night than during the day.
4. The human heart creates enough pressure to squirt blood 30 feet.
5. Women’s hearts beat faster than men’s.
6. You can survive without food and water for several days but not without sleep.
7. Your left lung is smaller than your right lung to make room for your heart.
8. The lungs contain over 300,000 million capillaries (tiny blood vessels). If they were laid end to end, they would stretch 2400km (1500 miles).
9. Sneezes regularly exceed 100 mph.
10. Human bone is as strong as granite in supporting weight. A block of bone the size of a matchbox can support 9 tonnes – that is four times as much as concrete can support.
11. Each finger and toenail takes six months to grow from base to tip.
12. 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.
13. 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.
14. The average person in the West eats 50 tonnes of food and drinks 50,000 liters (11,000 gallons) of liquid during his life.
15. 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.
16. 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.
17. In 30 minutes, the average body gives off enough heat (combined) to bring a half-gallon of water to boil.
18. A single human blood cell takes only 60 seconds to make a complete circuit of the body.
19. The eyes receive approximately 90 percent of all our information, making us basically visual creatures.
20. 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.
21. It takes 17 muscles to smile and 43 to frown. You use 200 muscles to take one step.
22. The length from your wrist to your elbow is the same as the length of your foot.
23. Your heart beats 101,000 times a day. During your lifetime it will beat about 3 billion times and pump about 400 million liters (800 million pints) of blood.
24. Your mouth produces 1 liter (1.8 pints) of saliva a day.
25. On average, you breathe 23,000 times a day and breathing generates about 0.6g of CO2 every minute.
26. On average, people can hold their breath for about one minute. The world record is 21 minutes 29 seconds, by David Merlini.
27. On average, you speak almost 5,000 words a day – although almost 80% of speaking is self-talk (talking to yourself).
28. Over the last 150 years, the average height of people in industrialized nations increased by 10 cm (4 in).
29. If the amount of water in your body is reduced by just 1%, you’ll feel thirsty.
30. It is impossible to sneeze and keep one’s eyes open at the same time.
31. 55% of people yawn within 5 minutes of seeing someone else yawn.
32. A person can live without food for about a month, but only about a week without water.
33. Men lose about 40 hairs a day. Women lose about 70 hairs a day.
34. The muscle that lets your eye blink is the fastest muscle in your body. It allows you to blink 5 times a second.
35. On average, you blink 15,000 times a day and 5.3 million times a year. Women blink twice as much as men.
36. Unless the food is mixed with saliva you cannot taste it.
37. The liver is the largest of the body’s internal organs.
38. On average a hiccup lasts 5 minutes.
39. Your fingernails grow at 1 nanometer per second (0.000 000 001 m/s). Your hair grows at 4 nanometers per second (0.000 000 004 m/s).
40. A newborn baby’s head accounts for one-quarter of its weight.
41. The bones in your body are not white – they range in color from beige to light brown. The bones you see in museums are white because they have been boiled and cleaned.
42. Our eyes are always the same size from birth.
43. Every person has a unique tongue print.
44. If all your DNA is stretched out, it would reach the moon 6,000 times.
45. Approximately two-thirds of a person’s body weight is water. Blood is 92% water. The brain is 75% water and the muscles are 75% water.
46. Your Body odor is unique as your fingerprint.
47. If the liver ever stops working a person will die within 8 to 24 hours.
48. More men than women are color blind about 8 out of every 200 men, as compared to 1 out of every 200 women.
49. The left side of your brain controls the right side of the body and vice versa.
50. It takes 48 hours for your body to completely digest the food from one meal.
51. A scientist who weighed people immediately before and after death concluded that the human soul weighs 21 gms.
52. Our nerves transmit messages at up to 300 ft per second.
53. The muscle of the human jaw exerts a force of over 219 kgs.
54. The most common disease in the world is tooth decay.
55. One-fifth of the oxygen we inhale is used up by the cells in the brain.
56. Man’s three-pound brain is the most complex and orderly arrangement of matter known in the universe.
57. On average, we lose 11 oz. of weight while we are asleep at night.
58. The human eye can distinguish about 17,000 different colors.
59. There are more than 600 muscles in our muscular system.
60. Blind people who have been blind from birth cannot dream of sights but they dream of sounds instead.
61. Chemically the substance that is closest to human blood is seawater.
62. You have about 3,000 taste buds on your tongue.
63. Sleepwalking is more common in children than in adults.
64. The tooth is the part of the human body that cannot repair itself.
65. When you die in your dream, you immediately wake up because your brain doesn’t know what happens after death.
66. While human beings achieve their maximum height when they hit puberty, their noses and ears keep on growing.
67. Human cornea receives oxygen directly from the atmosphere instead of the blood supply like other organs.
68. The fat content inside a human being is enough to make 7 bars of soap.
69. When someone blushes, the internal lining of their stomach also turns red. 
70. Human beings glow in the dark but its too timid for naked eye to detect.