These facts about the human body are simultaneously interesting, strange, and kind of disgusting.
I will never forget the words of Baz Luhrmann: “Love your body, use it in every way you can, do not be ashamed of it, or what other people think of it, it is the greatest instrument you will ever own”.
When I was younger I used this quote as an excuse to be a rampaging slut. Now that I’m 30 (Editor’s note: he’s actually 31), I use it as encouragement to go to the gym so my knees don’t crack in half in five years. Regardless, the human body is a pretty amazing thing. For everything we know about our bodies, there are probably a thousand things we don’t know.
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I would argue you could get through life knowing nothing more than which holes to put things in and push things out of, but isn’t having a little knowledge about it much more satisfying?
Here are 10 astonishing facts you may or may not know about the human body:
1. Your belly button houses thousands of bacteria that form their own ecosystem the size of an entire rainforest. If you aren’t in the bathroom washing your bellybutton with peroxide right now, shame on you.
2. In your lifetime you will produce about 25,000 quarts of spit, which is enough to fill up two swimming pools. It is also enough to have anal sex with 25,000 men.
3. Our noses can remember 50,000 different scents. Don’t you wish you could teach it to ignore the bad ones?
4. Red blood cells can travel your entire body in roughly 20 seconds. If you weren’t scared of Ebola before…
5. Our eyes are so sensitive that if the Earth were flat, we could see a candle from about 30 miles away. How is this helpful? I can’t even see my computer screen in front of my face.
6. Roughly 90% of our cells aren’t “human” in origin. Our cells originate mostly from fungi and bacteria. #Gross.
7. Our eyes can distinguish up to 10 million different colors and take in more information than any telescope. And yet we are all still so racist.
8. Our bodies actually glow in the dark, but the light we emit is 1,000 times weaker than what our eyes can detect. This is why we invented telescopes, right?
9. We share 50% of our DNA with bananas. This makes me wonder why it is possible to have a potassium deficiency.
10. We shed about 40 pounds of skin in our lifetime. Don’t you wish we could just shed it all at once? I could be down to my goal weight of 80 lbs.
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