Health Facts At Your Fingertips

Your fingertips mirror what’s happening in your body --- a tip-off to disease:

• Brittleness indicates generally poor health, possibly vitamin A or calcium deficiency.

• Ridges may often mean a hereditary condition, also indicating an injury or vitamin B complex deficiency.

• Separation (or if the nail lifts off) may indicate a fungus infection, an allergy, thyroid disorder or lack of iron.

• White Spots are usually caused by a blow or light physical shock. They can also indicate illness, zinc deficiency, a nervous problem or extreme cold.

• Opaque White Bands indicate a minor injury, a lack of protein, vitamin A or calcium.

• Cracking indicates imbalanced diet or a shortage of vitamin B2 (riboflavin).

Tidbits. Every night, the average person has 3 to 4 dreams, each lasting 10 minutes or more; when you touch something, the impulse travels along our nerve network to the brain at the rate of 350 feet per second; the human skull is made up of 29 different bones; for reasons unknown to science, color blindness affects more men than women.

Hard to believe, but everyday, blinking causes the eye to close for 30 minutes; the iris of the eye can adjust to light intensities up to 1,000 times; the average human circulatory system is 60,000 to 100,000 miles long; the largest organ of the body is the skin; everyday the bone manufactures 1,000,000,000 (one billion) red blood cells; the largest blood vessels in your body are 1-inch wide; in an average lifetime, the hair on your head grows about 25 feet.

Exercise Shorts. Swedish heart specialist Dr. Per-Olaf Astrand reports that with proper half-hour, twice-weekly exercise stints a man can save his heart 30,000 beats per day.

Exercise has been effectively used to treat patients with angina pectoris (a condition marked by recurrent pain in the chest and left arm, caused by a sudden decrease of the blood supply to the heart muscle), according to Aerospace Medicine.