AMAZING FACTS ABOUT YOUR BONES AND MIND
Bone
has been described as an engineering masterpiece of tensile, compressive and
elastic strength.
The
human skeleton consists of approximately 206 bones and 68 joints. The largest
bone is the femur, or thighbone; the smallest is the stapes, a bone inside your
ear.
As skilled gymnasts clearly
demonstrate, bones, muscles, cartilage, and joints can give a healthy body an
astonishing degree of flexibility and range of movement.
The thumb alone would convince
anyone that the architect of our body [whoever that may be to each one of us].
Bones can also take an incredible pounding.
They are constructed in exactly the same way that reinforced concrete is
constructed.
The steel of reinforced concrete
provides the tensile strength, while the cement, sand, and rock provide the
compressional strength.
However, the compression strength of bone is
greater than that of even the best reinforced concrete. We only wish we could
mimic it” said Robert o. Ritchie, a professor of materials science at the
University of California, Berkeley, U.S.A.
Unlike
concrete, bone is an essential part of countless living organisms. And it is
dynamic. It is able to repair itself, respond to hormones that affect its
growth and development, and even play a key role in the manufacture of blood
cells.
Also, like muscle, it slowly
grows stronger as the load on it increases. Hence, athletes have heavier bones
than so-called couch potatoes.
A fatty diet can clog your brain
as well as your coronary arteries. To understand the effects of a high-fat diet
on the brain, researchers in Canada; fed one-month-old rats a diet rich in
either animal or vegetable fat until they were four months old.
A control group was fed a low-fat
diet. Both groups were then given learning tasks. The results? The rats on the
two high-fat diets performed much more poorly than the lean rats.
Researcher Gordon Winocur said:
high-fat diets impair performance on virtually all our measures. It’s
remarkable how impaired these animals are. According to the report, the
researchers feel that;
Fat prevents the brain from
taking up glucose, possibly by interfering with the action of insulin, which
helps regulate blood sugar level.
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