10 Amazing Things Your Body Does Every Minute
By Tayler Glenn
Our bodies are amazing things. They carry us through marathons, up mountains, and fight to keep us healthy despite sickness, stress, and those times where we just forget to take care of ourselves like we should! Just in the few minutes it’ll take you to read this article, your body will have generated millions of blood cells + trillions of chemical signals just to keep you alive, but that’s not all. Here are some of the amazing things your body does every single minute!
1.) Interpreting Visual Data
Thanks to being very visual creatures, our brains constantly take in loads of visual data! But, it isn’t as simple as simply seeing and immediately understanding that visual stimulus.
As light passes through the cornea that covers the eye, that light is bent. The iris then changes the size of the pupil to control how much light enters the eye, then the lens focuses the remaining light onto the retina. Then that light is converted into electrical signals that travel from the eye to the brain for interpretation in only milliseconds! This process is actually so in-depth that it would take pages to explain, but it allows your brain to process a whopping 600 million bits of visual information in just one minute.
A single neuron can send as many as 1,000 nerve impulses every second which adds up to 60,000 per minute, and that’s the lowest estimate. The highest estimate is something we have trouble imagining: 17.2 TRILLION neural firings per minute! Since a healthy human brain has about 200 billion neurons, that means up to 12,000,000,000,000,000 signals are being sent throughout your brain. While we don’t understand the very inner workings of the brain, we know more than enough to be impressed!
3.) Growing Hair
You have somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000 hairs on your head, and each of them takes resources and energy to produce. Since each hair grows about a half-inch per month, you can expect each hair to grow 1.1 inches each minute!
4.) Saliva Production
The salivary glands in your mouth are constantly at work. Required to break down food, aid in digestion, and keep the mouth clean and infection-free, your saliva glands produce 1-2 liters of spit every day.
5.) Producing Millions of Blood Cells
That’s 120 million red blood cells every minute! That might seem like way too much, it’s actually necessary to keep up with the rate at which red blood cells wear out — about 120 days. Those cells are made inside your bone marrow and are tasked with important tasks like carrying oxygen and removing carbon dioxide.
6.) Repairing Bones
We like to think of bones as solid, but they aren’t as stable as you might think. We often forget that they’re living tissues that are constantly breaking down and rebuilding to maintain and grow. In fact, you’ll have created an entirely new skeleton every ten years!
7.) Cleaning Your Blood
Your two kidneys are on the job 24/7. Each minute they filter about 1.2 liters of blood, removing waste and sending the clean blood back into your bloodstream. Since the average adult body contains anywhere from 4.5 -5.5 liters of blood, all of your blood is filtered more than 30 times per day. This is even more impressive when you consider that the average kidney only weighs about a quarter of a pound!
8.) Creating Energy
One calorie from food equals 4,200 joules of energy, so a person who consumes 2,000 calories a day uses about 5,832 joules per minute. That’s enough to power a bright light bulb with only your body! But, this process is far from easy. It requires your cells and organs to work hard at breaking down foods into usable forms of energy, which is why eating nutritious foods is a must!
9.) Prevents Mutations
It’s estimated that each cell in the human body can endure tens of thousands of DNA lesions every day, and that damage can alter a cell’s DNA. With numbers that high, everyone in the world should have some sort of DNA mutation, right? Luckily, your body has your back by constantly checking DNA strands for signs, taking out and replacing damaged parts as needed. How incredible is that?
10.) Replacing Skin Cells
30,000 – 50,000 is the roughly the number of skin cells you’ll shed every minute of your life. That adds up to about 105 pounds in your lifetime! This organ protects you from the elements and takes some heavy damage in the process. Don’t worry – they’re replaced pretty quickly!
For all we put our bodies through, they deserve a little extra TLC! Support your health from the inside out with nutraMetrix Custom Health Solutions, and show your hard-working body some love this holiday season!