The True Nature of Mankind

The Incredible Human Body
Part 3

·  Energy
      The body gives off the amount of heat equivalent to a 100-watt light bulb and overall produces 25,000 BTUs. 26 calories are burned in a one-minute kiss and banging ones head against a wall will use 150 calories an hour. In a lifetime, the average US resident eats more than 50 tons of food and drinks more than 13,000 gallons of liquid. This includes 8 spiders. 75% of your body heat escapes through your head. The body uses 48 kg of ATP a day (ATP is the energy the body produces during cellular respiration). A person will die from total lack of sleep sooner than from starvation. Death will occur about 10 days without sleep, while starvation takes a few weeks. Small animals, like bats and shrews, consume up to one and one half times their body weight in food every day. For an adult male, this would be like eating 1,000 quarter-pound cheeseburgers a day, or about 50 Thanksgiving dinners a day. Moderate dancing burns 250 to 300 calories an hour. Twenty minutes of moderate dancing will elevate heart rate up to aerobic levels. One study found polkas, swing dancing, and waltzes to be particularly effective for weight loss. If you yelled for 8 years, 7 months and 6 days, you would have produced enough sound energy to heat one cup of coffee. Every human body is naturally radioactive. Our tissues contain traces of the radioactive isotopes Potassium-40 and Carbon-14, which are absorbed by all living organisms from the environment. Every person has nearly 400,000 radioactive atoms disintegrating into other atoms in his or her body each second. Women burn fat more slowly than men, by a rate of about 50 calories a day. Laughing is aerobic. It provides a workout for the diaphragm and increases the body's ability to use oxygen. Laughing lowers levels of stress hormones and strengthens the immune system. Six-year-olds laugh an average of 300 times a day. Adults only laugh 15 to 100 times a day. Most deaths in a hospital are between the times of 4pm and 6pm, the time when the human body is at its weakest. There are 110 calories consumed during an hour of typing, only 30 more than those used while sleeping.

·  Organs and Glands
Even if the stomach, the spleen, 75 percent of the liver, 80 percent of the intestines, one kidney, one lung, and virtually every organ from the pelvic and groin area are removed, the human body can still survive. The average Human bladder can hold 13 ounces of liquid. There are 35 million digestive glands in the stomach. The pituitary gland, responsible for producing the hormone that regulates growth, is only the size of a pea and weighs little more than a small paper clip. The liver is often called the body's chemical factory and performs over 500 functions. If 80 percent of your liver were to be removed, the remaining part would continue to function. Within a few months, the liver would have reconstituted itself to its original size. The liver is a gland, not an organ. The liver stretches across almost the width of the body, occupying a space about the size of a football. It weighs more than 3 lbs. The kidney consists of over 1 million little tubes, and the total length of the tubes in both kidneys runs to about forty miles.

·  Ingredients
      The body contains hydrogen, copper, zinc, cobalt, calcium, manganese, phosphates, nickel, sulfur, potassium, carbon iron, and silicon. The average human body contains enough: sulfur to kill all fleas on an average dog, carbon to make 900 pencils, potassium to fire a toy cannon, fat to make 7 bars of soap, phosphorus to make 2,200 match heads, water to fill a ten-gallon tank, and enough iron to make a 3 inch nail. The hydrochloric acid of the human digestive process is so strong a corrosive that it easily can eat its way through the iron of an automobile body. Yet, it doesn't endanger the stomach's sticky mucus walls. Smart people have more zinc in their hair. The body’s daily requirement of vitamins and minerals is less than a thimbleful.

·  Cells
      The human body consists of about 60 trillion cells, and each cell has about 10,000 times as many molecules as the Milky Way has stars. Except for your brain cells, 50,000 of the cells in your body will have died and been replaced with others, all while you have been reading this sentence. Three hundred million cells die in the human body every minute. The largest cell in the human body is the female reproductive cell, the ovum. The smallest is the male sperm. The average adult has between 40 and 50 billion fat cells.

·  DNA
      All of the DNA in an adult human body could fit inside one ice cube, but if unwound, stretched out and joined end to end, it would reach from the earth to the sun and back again more than 400 times. Scientists estimate that they could fill a 1,000-volume encyclopedia with the coded instructions in the DNA of a single human cell if the instructions could be translated to English.

·  Content
      If you were freeze dried, like coffee, 90% of your weight would be the real you and 10% would be the little critters that call your body their home. If all of the spaces between the nucleuses of the atoms making up an average human body were removed, the person would be the size of half a flea. However, they would still weigh the same.

·  Other Facts
·  Asparagus Urine: The first suspect was proposed in 1891. It was proposed that as your body metabolizes asparagus, it produces a smelly chemical, a metabolite called methanethiol, which your discriminating kidneys see fit to dump into the bladder. Other culprits suspected are S-Methyl Thioesters, or six sulfur-containing compounds. Research says just 22 percent of survey respondents experience asparagus urine, but the problem proved to be one not of producing the stinky urine, but of being able to sniff it out.
·  The average human body is worth about 25 dollars.
·  People are the only animals in the world who cry tears.
Undertakers report that human bodies do not deteriorate as quickly as they used to. The reason, they believe, is that the modern diet contains so many preservatives that these chemicals tend to prevent the body from decomposing too rapidly after death.
·  In the average lifetime, a person will walk the equivalent of 5 times around the equator.
·  The average adult stands 0.4 inch (1 cm) taller in the morning than in the evening because the cartilage in the spine compresses during the day.
·  The thumb is such a major player in the human body that it has a special section reserved for it in the brain that is separate from the area that controls the fingers.

* Please note that the facts appearing in the above section were gleaned from scores of resources, over several years, and those sources are not documented. These facts are true and correct to best of the author’s knowledge, and are open to correction.