1. The heart is one big muscular pump made up of involuntary striated muscle cells.
2. An adult heart pumps approx. 2,000 gallons of blood throughout the body.
3. The average adult heart beats 72 times a minute; 100,000 times a day; 3,600,000 times a year; and 2.5 billion times during a 70-year span.
4. An adult man’s heart weighs about 10 ounces and a woman’s about 8 ounces.
5. Your system of blood vessels — arteries, veins and capillaries — is over 60,000 miles long and would stretch around the world more than twice!
6. The human heart has four chambers, two superior atria and two inferior ventricles.
7. Blood flows into the right atrium and through the tricuspid valve into the right ventricle. From here it is pumped to the lungs to dispose of CO2 and pick up O2. Next the oxygenated blood is pumped into the left atrium and then to the left ventricle, through the bicuspid valve. Finally it is pumped out of the left ventricle to the body via the aorta.
8. The heartbeat (lub-dub sound) is the produced by the closing of the atrioventricular valves.
9. Arteries carry oxygenated blood away form the heart to the muscle cells. Veins carry deoxygenated blood back to the heart.
10. Blood pressure is a measure of the pressure exerted by blood on the walls of the heart chambers. Systolic is a measure of the pressure when the heart is pumping and diastolic is a measure when the heart is relaxed.
11. The pressure created in the heart during a heartbeat is enough to squirt blood a distance of thirty feet.
12. Blood takes about 20 seconds to circulate through the entire human body.
13. Electrical impulses in the heart muscle (the myocardium) are what cause the heart to beat
14. The first successful heart transplant was performed in Cape Town, South Africa in 1967. 15. Most heart attacks occur between the hours of 8 and 9 AM with Monday being the most “popular” day.
16. Every day 2,700 people die of heart disease.
17. The risk of heart disease for inactive people is double that of people who get regular exercise.
18. To reduce the chances of heart disease the American Heart Association recommends at least 30min of moderate exercise on most days of the week.
19. Regular exercise can strengthen your heart and cardiovascular system and improve circulation, helping your body use oxygen better and lower blood pressure.
20. It is thought that the heart got its love association in the ancient Greek city of Cyrene due to the Silphium plant with it’s heart-shaped seed pods that grew in the region.
21. The Greeks believed the heart was the seat of the spirit, the Chinese associated it with the center for happiness and the Egyptians thought the emotions and intellect arose from the heart.
22. Plato theorized that reasoning originated in the brain, but passion originated in the heart.
Be kind to your heart, you only get one!! Treat it well with exercise and a healthy diet.