As you go through your day, you probably don’t spend much time thinking about your heart and all that it’s doing. But let’s take a few moments to appreciate this life-sustaining organ in your chest.
If your heart is still beating perfectly well, you have something to be grateful to God for. A lot of people have had heart disease, but for you, you wake up and not once you check whether your heart is beating or not. I believe is as you read, you are now conscious of your beating heart.
With that being said, let's look at some facts about this important part of our body.👇
DID YOU KNOW:
Your heart beats about 100,000 times per day. During the average person’s lifetime, their heart beats more than 2.6 billion times. (Your pulse is a way you can feel your heart beating.)
The beating sound from your heart — lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dub — is from the clap of valve leaflets opening and closing.
A typical human heart valve is about the size of a half dollar.
Each minute, your heart pumps nearly 1.5 gallons (5.7 liters) of blood. That’s a pump flow rate that could fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool in less than a year. (Talk about a gold medal effort!)
Your adult-sized heart is about the size of two hands clasped together. A child’s heart is about the size of a single fist.
It’s located in the front of your chest, slightly behind and to the left of your breastbone. Your ribs offer extra protection for the vital organs.
To make room for your heart, your left lung is slightly smaller than your right lung.
Your heart weighs somewhere between 7 ounces and 15 ounces (200 grams to 425 grams), or less than a pound. The average male’s heart weighs 2 ounces (57 grams) more than the average female’s heart.
For comparison’s sake, a blue whale — the world’s largest animal — has a heart weighing more than 1,000 pounds. A person could easily crawl through the aorta in that sized heart.
The smallest animal heart can be found in fairyflies. You’d need a microscope to see the ticker in this tiny insect.
Your heart works as a coordinated machine. The right side of your heart pumps “used” blood from your body into your lungs, where it refills with oxygen. The left side of your heart then pumps re-oxygenated blood back into your body.
Almost every cell in your body gets blood from your heart. The outliers can be found in the corneas of your eyes.
Your heart pumps blood through about 60,000 miles (96,000 kilometers) of blood vessels. To put that in perspective, this blood tubing system could circle the Earth at the equator TWICE.
A female’s average heartbeat is faster than a male’s by almost eight beats a minute. The reason? Because their hearts are usually smaller in size, females need their hearts to beat more to pump the same amount of blood.
A typical heart pumps approximately 4 tablespoons of blood with each beat.
Your heart has its electrical supply and will continue to beat even when separated from your body. This specialized network of cells is known as the heart’s electrical conduction system.
A joke a day may help keep the heart doctor away, as laughing can improve heart health by lowering stress and relaxing blood vessels. Happiness can lower your risk of heart disease, too.
Heart cancer is very rare because heart cells stop dividing in adulthood, making them more resistant to the sort of mutations that can lead to cancer.
