7 Interesting Health Facts

1. When you take a step, you are using up to 200 muscles

Your body has about 650 muscles. It doesn't matter that you only care about four or five of them. You need every one in order to perform the normal functions of everyday life—eating, breathing, walking, holding in your stomach at the beach. You don't need to spend a lot of time thinking about most of your muscles. The 200 muscles involved in walking do the job whether you monitor them or not.


2. Women Smell Better than Men



Body odor reveals more than when we last showered — it also packs important biological information. And apparently women are better at catching the scent of body odor than men, a new study found. The researchers think women are more attuned to underarm stink because the biological data it contains helps them choose mates. The fact that most women are even better at smelling male body odor than female body odor seems to support this idea. Scientists asked women and men to rate the strength of underarm sweat samples collected from both genders. When the scent was presented on its own, it smelled equally strong to both women and men. But when the researchers combined the body odor with other fragrances, the smell was often masked for men, though women could usually still detect it.



3. Chewing gum boosts your brain power

Need a little help focusing? Coffee’s not the only answer. Studies suggest that popping a stick of gum can help increase alertness, ward off fatigue and even improve memory. Turns out people get the same energy boost from sugared and sugar-free gum, since it’s likely the act of chewing itself that revs up blood flow and brain activity. 

4. It's possible to die from a broken heart

According to recent studies, it’s possible to die from heart failure after an intense emotional event! It’s called Stress Cardiomyopathy. It happens when emotional events such as death or divorce cause adrenaline levels in the body to rise to such high levels for days on end that the heart begins to die. 

5. Run Less to Grow Faster

Running doesn't build muscle mass. If it did, marathoners would have legs like defensive linemen, and workers in Boston would have to repave the streets each year following the city's signature race. But running shrinks muscle fibers to make them more metabolically efficient, thereby saving the pavement.

6. The female egg is the body's largest cell and the male sperm is its smallest

The largest cell in the human body is the female egg and the smallest is the male sperm. While you can’t see skin or muscle cells, the ovum is typically a millimetre in diameter, large enough to be seen with the naked eye. Yet the sperm cell is tiny, consisting of little more than a nucleus

7.  Staying awake for 17 hours is the same for your body drinking 2 glasses of wine!

It can be tempting to cut back on the hours you sleep at night to finish a paper or get some extra work done, but staying awake for 17 hours actually has the same effects on your body as drinking two glasses of wine. It messes with the brain’s ability to function, making it harder to concentrate and affecting judgment. It’s not entirely clear to scientists why we need to sleep because the energy saved by sleeping is fairly low, about 50 kCal. Sleep simply affects the brain’s ability to function.