You inhale about 17,000 times a day. I didn’t notice it, but it was really a huge concerted effort. Vital organs such as the intestines, brain, bones, lungs, blood and heart work together to sustain life by delivering oxygen to the tissues in the body, since most cells require oxygen to make them. a molecule called ATP – the energy that helps cells function. However, to carry oxygen around the body is an extremely difficult task and it happens in the following order.
First, in order for oxygen to reach the cells of the body, an extremely large transport network is required. This is the job of 20 trillion red blood cells. Each cell contains 270 million oxygen-binding molecules. To make these cells, the body uses materials from the foods we eat. So the process of transporting oxygen throughout the body will begin in the intestines. Here, food is broken down into various substances and absorbed through the intestinal wall. Among those substances, iron is the main raw material for the production of red blood cells.
Iron travels through the circulatory system to the hematopoietic tissues in the bone marrow, where red blood cells are made. The kidneys regulate the amount of red blood cells by releasing erythropoietin , a hormone that stimulates bone marrow growth. Every second, our body needs to make 2.5 million blood cells to carry oxygen around the body.
The brain also aids in this process by sending messages through the nervous system to the diaphragm and intercostal muscles telling them to contract, causing the chest cavity to expand, creating space for the lungs to expand. That gap causes your lungs to bring negative pressure to suck in oxygenated air from outside.
Imagine your lungs are two big bubbles, but they are actually much more complicated. The blood cells in the blood vessels in your lungs can only pick up oxygen molecules that are very close to them. So the inside of the lungs is divided into hundreds of millions of mini balls called alveoli, thereby increasing the contact surface to 100 square meters. The alveolar walls are made up of extremely thin cells surrounded by capillaries that help bring blood and oxygen close enough for diffusion.
After receiving enough oxygen, oxygen-rich cells are transported throughout the body through a circulatory system consisting of a set of capillaries capable of reaching every cell in the body. If we spread out all the blood vessels in the body, we could wrap a few circles around the Earth, a very long road. Therefore, in order for blood to travel around the body in an extremely short time, it requires a large enough and continuous push, which is when the heart works. The human heart beats an average of 100,000 times a day, pushing blood to every nook and cranny.
This whole complex system is built with only one task to carry oxygen throughout the body. If one function fails, our whole body collapses. Guts, brains, bones, lungs, blood and heart work together in a rhythm that lasts year after year, a perfect system!