Share these amazing and fun facts with your kids.
It’s American Heart Month – and that means more than just playful red hearts on Valentine’s Day. It’s a month to celebrate the heart that’s inside your body, pumping blood from head to toe and keeping you alive. Here are some incredible – and true – facts about this amazing organ in your chest!
- Touch your heart and feel it beat. It’ll beat 100,000 times today. During your lifetime, your heart will beat billions of times!
- Every minute, your heart pumps almost 1.5 gallons of blood. That’s nearly 90 gallons an hour!
- Your heart is connected to 60,000 miles of blood vessels – all within your body! – that carry blood everywhere. If these blood vessels were stretched out, they’d circle the entire Earth twice!
- The smallest blood vessels – called capillaries – are so tiny that it would take 10 of them, stacked on top of one another, just to be as thick as one single hair on your head!
- Your heart would continue to beat even if it’s taken out of your body! That’s because it has its own electrical supply.
- Heart disease is one of the biggest health problems in the world. But you can help keep your heart healthy by doing certain things:
- Stay active and get plenty of physical exercise. Play sports you enjoy, go hiking at a local park or pick any other fun thing that gets you up and moving!
- Eat a healthy diet. Help your heart by having more veggies, and less salt and sugar.
- No joke – scientists have also shown that laughing can help your heart stay healthy!
Ask your doctorabout other fun ways to keep your heart healthy. And quiz your friends – and teachers! – to see if they know the amazing facts above!
Sources:
“30 Facts About Your Heart,” Cleveland Clinic, https://health.clevelandclinic.org/fun-facts-about-your-heart/.
“Heart Facts,” Kids Heart ChallengeTM, American Heart Association®, https://www2.heart.org/site/SPageServer?pagename=khc_resources_heart_facts.