Did you know that it takes only 60 seconds for blood to make one complete circuit of the body and reach every cell?

That’s pretty speedy considering the combined length of all the body’s blood vessels is equal to 4 times the earth’s circumference.  The blood has plenty of ground to cover!

The importance of blood is not up for debate. We’re dependent on our blood.  As it circulates the body it provides the body with the oxygen and nutrients it needs to survive and function, while also carrying away waste.

We could say that our blood gets ‘recycled’.  After zooming through our body, other organs (Eg. our kidneys) filter and clean the blood for another ‘lap around the track’!

It’s interesting to know that at any given time our body is holding between 10-12 pints of blood – that’s just over 1 gallon.

When we ‘donate’ blood, the nurses will typically take 1 pint of that.  Most people are said not to feel much difference having one less pint in them.  Those who do experience any degree of dizziness will have fully recovered within 24 hours, as much of the fluid in the blood will have been replaced.

Resources: Givelife2.org | Kidshealth.org | “The Odd Body” (Dr. Stephen Juan)

If you took all the blood vessels out of an adult human being and put them in a line, the length of that line would be about 100,000miles.

That’s 4 X the circumference of the earth at the equator.    Pretty hard to believe, isn’t it!

Most of the blood vessels in the human body are very short in length.  They are in fact microscopic capillaries.

The reason it gets around the earth 4 X is because there are 40 billion of them….yep, Billion with  a “B”. (We’re talking the “American billion” – ie. 1,000,000,000 not the “British Billion” which is considered to be 1,000,000 X 1,000,000.)

But even that is hard to fathom.  How much is a “billion” anyway?

For some perspective:

• A billion seconds ago would take us back to the 1960s.
• A billion minutes ago people like Jesus would have been walking the earth.
• A billion hours ago our ancestors were rubbing sticks together in the stone-age.

Point being, a billion of anything adds up.

Sources: The Franklin Institute