I’m writing this week’s column on interesting facts about our bodies. Here are a few:

Every human spent about half an hour as a single cell.

The strongest muscle in the human body is the tongue. Every tongue print is unique, much like a fingerprint. It takes 17 muscles to smile and 42 muscles to frown. You use 200 muscles to take just one step.

Each square inch of human skin contains 20 feet of blood vessels. Also, every square inch of skin accommodates about 20,000 bacteria.

The feet account for one quarter of all the human bones. Babies are born with 300 bones, but by the time they reach adulthood they have only 206, because some bones fuse. Your teeth start growing about six months before you’re born.

One out of 200 infants already has a developed tooth at birth. The tooth is the only part of the body that can’t repair itself.

The colder the room you sleep in, the better the chance you’ll have a bad dream. The three things pregnant women dream most about during their first trimester are frogs, worms, and potted plants.

An average person has over 1,460 dreams a year. That’s about four dreams each night. Many scientists believe the higher your IQ, the more you dream.

Women blink twice as many times as men. Muscles that control your eyes contract about 100,000 times a day. Less than one third of the human race has 20/20 vision. Your eyes are the same size from birth, but your nose and ears keep growing. Your eyes can actually see your nose all the time, but your brain ignores it.

On a clear night the human eye can see about 2,000 to 3,000 stars in the sky. The human eye is so sensitive that if the earth were flat, you could actually see a candle flickering 30 miles away.

A fetus acquires fingerprints at the age of three months.

Your nose can remember 50,000 scents. 

The average human drinks about 16,000 gallons of water in their lifetime.

Your body has enough iron in it to make a nail 3 inches long.

The most common blood type in the world is type O. The rarest blood type is h/h or “Bombay” blood (first discovered in Bombay, now known as Mumbai, in India), and has been found in less than a hundred people since its discovery.

An average human scalp has 100,000 hairs.

It is not possible to tickle yourself, because your brain can predict where the tickle is coming from. Your brain uses about 20 percent of all your oxygen and caloric intake.

In just 30 minutes, your body can produce enough heat to boil a gallon of water.

You are 1 centimeter (3/8 inch) taller in the morning than before you went to bed.

You have no sense of smell when you’re sleeping.

Children grow faster in the spring as compared to any other time of year.

Did you know 50 percent of human DNA is the same as a banana’s?

Your brain is more active at night than in daytime. If the human brain were a computer, it could actually perform 38 thousand-trillion operations per second.

I hope you enjoyed these interesting, but true facts about the human body. As the Bible teaches “We are fearfully and wonderfully made.”

Diet or exercise question? Email me at dwcrocker77@gmail.com. David Crocker of Landrum has been a nutritionist and master personal trainer for 29 years.