Amazing Facts About Bones – and Bone Health – for Kids
Every May, people around the country spread the news about the importance of healthy bones. You can help! Share these fun facts about your bones – and the tips to keep them healthy – with your friends, family and classmates.
- Bones are a living and growing tissue.
- Kids have more bones than adults! Babies are born with about 300 bones and cartilage, but as you get older, lots of this cartilage fuses together to form larger bones (which lowers the total number of bones in your body). By the time you’re an adult, you’ll only have 206 bones!
- More than half of your bones are in your feet and hands! Each of your hands has 27 bones, and each foot has 26!
- The spongy inside part of your bones, called the marrow, creates hundreds of billions of blood cells every day!
- The bone in your upper leg – called the femur – is your largest bone. Your smallest bone is in your middle ear. It’s called the stirrup or stapes, and it’s only 2-3 millimeters long (about the size of an ant!).
Want to know another surprising fact? To have healthy bones as an adult, you need to start doing certain things while you’re still a kid. Here are a few of the things you should do now to make sure your bones stay strong and healthy later:
- During meals and snacks, have food and drinks with calcium. Calcium is a key mineral that keeps your bones strong. Milk, cheese, yogurt, leafy-green veggies, tuna and salmon all have calcium. Yum!
- Also have foods and drinks with vitamin D. Many types of orange juice, milk and breakfast cereals have vitamin D added in – ask your parents or guardians to get these at the grocery store! Tuna and salmon also have this important vitamin.
- Get plenty of physical activity. Your bones get stronger when you use them, so get your exercise each day by playing games, getting outdoors, participating in sports, jumping rope or whatever other fun activity you love. Keep moving – and keep those bones strong!
No bones about it – you have the power to take steps now, as a kid, to keep your skeleton strong! Get your calcium, vitamin D and daily exercise, and spread the word about these amazing and important facts.
Sources: National Institutes of Health, American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Illinois Bone & Joint Institute.