Interior Design

This is all about you. It’s about your insides and how well they were designed.

Think you know this already? Well, think again.

Did you know that you have six hundred million tiny air sacs inside your lungs? That’s 600,000,000. Stretch them out and you could cover a tennis court with them.

The air you breathe can be hot or cold, dry or wet. But when it enters your lungs, it’s always body temperature with 75 to 80 percent moisture. The inside of your nose makes those changes.

In the time it takes you to read this paragraph, your body will make at least four million—that’s 4,000,000—new blood cells. This happens inside your bones.

Here’s a good one: What are Kupffer cells? You’ll find the answer—and a lot of other cool stuff—right here. Read on.

Killer Cells . . .

. . . lurk in your body. Don’t worry, you need them. They’re good guys looking for bad germs. When they see a germ, your white blood cells stalk it, surround it, and eat it! In fact, scientists call some of these cells macrophages, which means “big eaters.”

Other white cells creep up on a germ and explode. They spill chemicals over the germ to make it harmless.

Some killer cells are part of your liver. They don’t stalk germs. They sit and wait for poisons to pass by. Lots of blood flows through your liver. When these cells see a poison cell passing, they reach out, grab the bad cell, and eat it.

The killer cells in your liver are called Kupffer cells. Someone with the last name of Kupffer first described them.

How do these killer cells know what’s bad for you? How do they know what to do?

We don’t really know. That’s just the way they’re made.

More Liver, Please

Let’s hope you don’t have to say

that some day, especially about your own liver.

Put your hand near the bottom of your ribs, near the right front part of your body. There’s your liver.

Your liver stores sugar and vitamins, helps your digestion and helps your blood to clot, cleans your blood, makes bile, stores iron, and more. You get the idea. Scientists say that your liver has about 500 separate jobs to do.

You can’t live more than a day—or two at the most—without your liver.

Maybe that’s why God designed it to make more of itself. If half your liver is injured somehow, the other half will grow more cells to make you a whole liver. If three-quarters of your liver doesn’t work, the other quarter will grow you a new liver. You don’t even have to say, “More liver, please.”

What a marvelous design for such an important part of your body!

Something Stretchy

Make a fist and look at it. That’s about the size of your empty stomach.

Now close your eyes and imagine the supper you ate last night. Imagine all of it lumped together and sitting in your stomach. That’s a little bigger than your closed fist, isn’t it?

Your stomach stretches. No other part of your body stretches like that. But then, no other part of your body is designed for short-term storage of food. If your stomach didn’t stretch, you’d have to eat tiny meals several times a day.

Aren’t you glad that your stomach’s made of something stretchy?

You’ve Got Gas . . .

. . . in your lungs, and that’s as it should be.

Every cell in your body needs oxygen, a gas. Your lungs deliver that oxygen to your body.

Deep down inside your lungs lie tiny, thin-walled sacs called alveoli (al-VEE-oh-lye). The air you breathe goes into those sacs.

Outside those sacs lie lots of tiny blood vessels. Those vessels are so tiny, blood has to squeeze through them one cell at a time. Picture a train with lots of boxcars moving down a track.

Blood coming into your lungs carries carbon dioxide (one molecule per “boxcar”).Your body needs to get rid of that. So the alveoli pick carbon dioxide off the blood cells and put oxygen on.

How do alveoli know just what to do? How do they work so perfectly? That’s just the way they were designed.

Your Turn: See how long you can hold your breath. Not forever, right? Your body is designed to breathe automatically, whether or not you tell it to. That’s for your own good.

Something Slimy

That’s your stomach again, and for a very good reason. It’s just doing its job.

To break down your food, your stomach makes lots of acid. That acid is so strong it can eat metal.

If it can eat metal, why doesn’t the acid eat your stomach? Because your stomach is slimy inside. That slime protects it from the acid.

That’s really a perfect stomach design.