This will be a fun post but not if you’re a germophobe. I can deal with just about anything, but these items still have the ability to make my skin crawl just a little. If I had to sit around and obsess about bacteria and mites infesting my body like my better-half does, I would lose my mind. Hang onto whatever you like to hang onto, this ride might get a little bumpy.
Itchiness in humans is contagious. Watching someone else itch makes your brain think it’s experiencing an itch, even when it’s not.
The average bed is home to 10,000,000 dust mites.
It goes without saying that every day you inhale thousands of you own skin flakes since you lose approximately 40,000 flakes per minute.
Your skin contains billions of individual bacteria.
The most common bacteria found in your belly button is of the same species that make your feet smell.
There are mites that live in your hair follicles, eyelashes, and eyebrows. They walk around on your skin at night before returning to their hair follicles during the day.
Tapeworms inside humans have been measured as long as 20 feet.
Fungi thrive on the protein keratin found in hair, nails, and skin.
Men and women fart approximately the same amount each day, a half-liter of gas a day.
Did you know that defecaloesiophobia is the fear of painful bowel movements.
(Did you know?)
FART IS ONE OF THE OLDEST WORDS IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
The human body is an amazing organism. It can create miracles by healing itself to survive unbelievably nasty injuries. That doesn’t change the fact that it can also be truly disgusting as we all know. Today’s Thanksgiving post will review some gross facts about the human body and the things that it has the ability to produce after eating a turkey and all the side dishes. A little gross but what isn’t. This should be on your mind as you chow down on your big meal today. LOL
URINE
The average person produces approximately 3 pints of urine a day. In the normal adult the bladder rarely holds more than about 3/4 of a pint of urine, with the urge to urinate coming at the 1/2-pint mark. More than one pint causes pain and an intense urge to urinate immediately.
FUN FACT: In Roman times gladiators would brush their teeth with urine and then gargle with it too. They believed it was good for their gums.
SPIT
Most people produce approximately 8 cups of spit a day. It’s produced by three sets of salivary glands around the mouth area. That works out to about 50,700 pints produced in the average human lifetime. Thats enough to fill a couple of large swimming pools.
VOMIT
In humans very often after one person begins vomiting, it triggers vomiting in others (emetophobia). Compared to other animals, humans are relatively light on vomiting. Big vegetarian whales vomit every 7-10 days to help get rid of anything inedible they may have swallowed by accident. Dogs not only vomit frequently, but they’ll also eat their own vomit. Probably the most vomitus animals, however, are cows, who digest otherwise in edible grass by regurgitating it into their mouths, chewing it for a bit, and then swallowing it over and over again.
FUN FACT: Emetophobia is the fear of vomiting and of being around others who are vomiting. It is the fifth most common phobia according to the International Emetophobia Society.
SNOT
Snot is a defensive function, stopping for example germs, dirt and pollen from getting into your lungs. The average person produces approximately 1/2 pint of snot per day. When you sneeze, up to six pints of air is blasted out of your lungs at approximately 100 miles per hour, along with any germs you may be carrying at the time. Sneezing is also the main way that illnesses like colds and flu are spread among humans.
FECES
If you add up all the time spent eating and drinking by an average human over the course of their entire life, it comes to approximately 5 years. This adds up to 33 tons of food, which is equivalent to eating six entire elephants. Unfortunately, what goes in must come out. Most of that mass is water that you lose through sweating, breathing, and peeing, or carbon that you breathe out in the form of carbon dioxide, while a lot of the rest goes into making new bits for your body that need replacing. The result is that during your lifetime you will produce a pile of feces about the size of a car.
FUN FACT: According to the World Toilet Organization, the average person visits the toilet approximately 6-8 times a day, or 2500 times a year, and spends three years of their life sitting on the toilet.
It seems that almost everyone is obsessed with their body image and that’s understandable considering the wide range of odd, shaped bodies we see every day. Even though there are so many variations, the functions and organs of the body are all too similar. Here are a few trivia facts about our bodies. They can be a thing of beauty or not and they can be a bit disgusting or not. Beauty is definitely in the eye of the beholder.
Did you know that approximately 1 in every 18 men have a third nipple. People who have the condition will sometimes suffer from atelophobia, the fear of being imperfect. Celebrities Tilda Swinton, Carrie Underwood, Lily Allen, and Mark Wahlberg have third nipples. Mark Wahlberg’s third nipple was airbrushed out of his famous Calvin Klein underwear ad.
If you have a fear of facial hair, you could be suffering from pogonophobia. In ancient times beards were a sign of strength and wisdom and were only cut or sheared off as punishment or if someone was in mourning.
Were you aware that your left lung is slightly smaller than your right. It’s to allow room for your heart.
Did you know that women need more sleep at night than men. Women need an extra hour of sleep but sometimes don’t get it. Not getting that extra hour is believed to be one reason why women are more susceptible to depression than men.
My cat’s hairballs creep me out. I discovered recently that human beings can also have hairballs and they’re even more disgusting than the cats. The largest human hairball ever removed from the body measured 15 inches in diameter and weighed 10 pounds. The patient also happened to suffer from a condition called trichophagia (the eating of one’s own hair).
The heart is life. Over the course of a lifetime the human heart beats 3 billion times. Your heartbeat mimics the music you listen to and can trigger physiological changes that increase or decrease your blood pressure. The heart is a massive blood pump circulating blood through an average body every 23 seconds or approximately 4000 gallons of blood each day.
The human body never ceases to amaze. Just when you think you’ve heard everything you could possibly hear about human bodies and their uses and peculiarities, you find out you had no idea just how strange they can be. So, let me start your education with more facts about your human body.
Fingernails grow four times faster than toenails.
Bright light and sunshine can make you sneeze.
Right-handed people live on average, nine years longer than left-handed people.
Redheads are more likely than other people to be left-handed.
Humans sweat up to a pint of fluid each night.
Humans can survive longer without food than they can without sleep.
Sleeping with an electric blanket can interrupt your sleep patterns and make it difficult to get a good night’s sleep.
Earwax is not wax.
Your belly button is home to more than 60 strains of bacteria.
The average adult toenail is home to 43 species of fungi.
And here’s an historical fun fact that is one of my favorites:
Benjamin Franklin wrote an essay about farts and flatulence called “Fart Proudly”.
After the last few years, I’ve become something of an expert on the human body and all of its frailties. It’s not something I ever wanted to know but when you’re put in a position where you have no choice, you learn. I thought I’d pass along a short list of interesting items about the human body that might help you learn some things you didn’t know. Let’s see . . .
The longest hiccupping attack lasted 65 years; the longest sneezing fit lasted 978 days; and the longest yawning ordeal lasted for five weeks.
The average human body has 14 to 18 square feet of skin.
The average human head contains approximately 100,000 hairs.
Assuming that the heart beats at least once a second, by the time a person is 70, his or her heart will have beat at least 2.8 billion times.
Approximately 200,000,000 to 300,000,000 sperm cells are contained in a single human ejaculation.
Every human being will drink approximately 16,000 gallons of water in their lifetime.
It takes 17 muscles to smile and 43 to frown.
A human being will lose 1/2 to 3/4 of the bodies heat by not covering the head in cold weather.
The hyoid bone resides by itself in the throat, and it supports the tongue and its muscles. It is the only bone in the body that does not connect with another bone.
Whether the person is male or female, the number of hairs lost in a given day is approximately 25-225 hairs.
And for my final entry I’ll explain how religion manages to involve itself in virtually everything. We’ve all heard during our lives about the “Adam’s Apple”. It refers to a religious legend that claims a piece of the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden was stuck in Adam’s throat. My only question is why Eve didn’t never had one.
Are you human? Has anyone ever honestly asked you that question? If someone ever does, ask for specifics. Being human is a ridiculously hard job since the body seems to be on autopilot most of the time. Breathing, digesting food, eliminating waste, and a host of other things. It goes about the business of keeping us alive and does what’s needed regardless of how we feel. It’s truly the only thing that keeps us alive regardless of how careless and stupid we are. Read on . . .
Did you know that on average, the whiskers in a man’s beard grow nearly 6 inches per year?
If you’re a man, and your index finger is shorter than your ring finger your one third more likely to be diagnosed with prostate cancer. Scientists think that men with longer index fingers have lower levels of testosterone, which offers some protection against prostate cancer.
Human fingernails grow four times faster than their toenails.
The only places on the human body where hair will not grow are the soles of the feet, palms of the hand, lips, and eyelids (not counting eyelashes).
Did you know the heart mimics the music you listen to and can trigger physiological changes that increase or decrease your blood pressure?
Your left lung is slightly larger than your right lung.
The longest recorded bout of pickups lasted for 68 years. Charles Osborne, a hog farmer from Iowa began hiccupping in 1922 and didn’t stop until 1990 at age 97.
Right-handed people live, on average, nine years longer than left-handed people.
Redheads are more likely than other people to be left-handed.
Human beings can survive longer without food than they can without sleep. The longest any person has gone without sleep not using stimulants or other drugs is 264 hours, or about 11 days. The longest a person has gone without food or water (total starvation) is 73 days.
TAKE CARE OF YOUR BODY, IT’S ALWAYS TAKING CARE OF YO
After my last two years of medical issues and treatments, I consider myself something of an expert on my own body. I thought I knew all I needed to know but once again I was mistaken. Here are a few really interesting tidbits that will blow your mind. Even you former and current medical professionals, you know who you are. Here we go . . .
On average there are approximately 75,000,000,000,000 (trillion) cells in the human body.
There are ten times as many bacteria cells living in your gut (750 trillion).
Sixty percent of the solids in your poo are made up of bacteria from your gut.
There are about 100 billion nerve cells in the adult human brain, but 10 times as many support cells to look after them.
Adults lose on average, about 100,000 nerve cells from their brain every day. Over the course of a lifetime this adds up to losing about 7% of the brain.
Your heart beats approximately 100,000 times a day without rest for an entire lifetime – that’s more than 2.5 billion beats in your life.
Laid end to end, a child’s blood vessels would stretch for over 60,000 miles: and adults for 100,000 miles – that’s four times around the Equator.
The blood of an adult male contains more than 25 trillion cells.
An average red blood cell lives for only 120 days. During this time, it will travel 300 miles on its journey round and round the body.
The average male produces 50,000 sperm per minute – that’s 72 million per day. A single male ejaculation contains 200 million sperm – theoretically enough to generate a combined population of Britain, France, and Germany.
Each sperm leaving the penis travels at 8000 body lengths per second, equivalent to a human swimming at 34,000 miles per hour.
Over the course of three years almost every cell in your body will have been replaced by new ones, making you literally a different person to who you were two years ago.
One square inch of human skin has 19 million cells, 60 hairs, 90 oil glands, 19 feet of blood vessels, and 625 sweat glands.
Fingernails grow twice to four times as fast as toenails and the nail on the middle finger grows the fastest.
If you lose a toenail, it will take approximately six months to grow back completely.
I actually love all of these bizarre facts that are available about the human body. I’m just as glad that I found out late in life about all this nonsense because it would have freaked me out a bit in my younger years. I’m just so happy that I get to share it with all of you and if you’re really lucky you might be able to win a few Trivia Night Contests at your local tavern. Have one for me while you’re there.
everyuselessthing.com 