Did You Know? February 2013 Edition

8 February 2013

Did You Know? February 2013 Edition

More Americans die of obesity than in any other country in the world. In fact, we have more obesity-related deaths than Canada, Mexico, Germany, Austria and Spain combined.

Coughing makes your blood pressure increase and your sensitivity to pain decrease.

Two-thirds of all American adults suffer from hemorrhoids.

On average, a pound of potato chips costs 200 times more than a pound of regular potatoes.

People with gum disease are twice as likely to suffer from a stroke or heart attack.

Your memory is better in the morning than in late afternoon, especially for those over the age of 70.

Stress headaches are often due to your body rerouting blood flow away from the brain to other areas of the body.

The United States has the highest marriage rate in the world. The country with the highest divorce rate? Also the United States.

Every three minutes, someone in the U.S. dies of a stroke.

According to a recent study from Hormones and Behavior, men find women more attractive when the woman is ovulating or near ovulation, which also happens to be when they’re most fertile.

Eight percent of American adults suffer from serious mental illness.

Twenty to 50 percent of all antibiotic use in the U.S. is unnecessary.

Statistics show that less than 20 percent of patients are fully informed about a prescription’s risks and benefits before consenting to taking the drug.

Five percent of women and one percent of men over the age of 40 are plagued by adult acne.

Your brain uses 20 percent of the oxygen in your bloodstream.

Stress causes or contributes to 90 percent of all diseases.

Within a half an hour, your body generates enough heat to boil half a gallon of water.

The scent of a woman’s tears decreases men’s sexual response.

Every bottle of beer you drink per day reduces your risk of kidney stones by 40 percent.

Spinach is not rich in iron. That myth was started as the result of a printing error 70 years ago, when a table showing the nutritional value of certain foods put the decimal point one place too far to the right, mistakenly increasing spinach’s iron content 10-fold. While the mistake was corrected seven decades ago, the myth still persists.

 

Did You Know? February 2013 Edition