Geek Out: Hypnotized By The Heart? Bewitched By The Brain? Take Our Quiz And Discover Your “Significant Organ”!
Just like your brain, you never get tired of carbs or contemplation.
You and your neurons just love the glucose molecules that come from carbohydrates, choosing these over fats and proteins any day.
You both appreciate the importance of education and mental stimulation throughout life, vital for the development and then lifetime maintenance of connections between the millions of neurons. It’s not just about doing crosswords and sudoku though, and in choosing Simon and Garfunkel’s song about communication and/or sleep (depending on whose interpretation you read!) you’re in tune (haha) with the brain again - all those social interactions, dreams and zzz’s are also considered vitally important to our mental wellbeing. Throw in some regular exercise too and you have the complete prescription for supporting brain health.
You share a love of warmth with the brain (although not quite 451°F!) and the brain will let you know very rapidly and unpleasantly if it’s getting too cold. Choose to indulge in chocolate chip ice-cream deliciousness and the blood vessels passing by your mouth on their way up to your brain are cooled. The arrival of this chilly blood at the brain is not appreciated, the brain making its displeasure known by generating the dreaded brain freeze signal which stops you from eating any more of the cold stuff – well, at least for a moment or two!
And finally, great choice to crush on Marie Curie. Professor Curie’s work with radioactivity was critical to the development of the CT scanner, a technology which has helped the brain to reveal many of its secrets. Brain tumors can be often cured or at least reduced with radiotherapy, so yes, the brain too, is a big Curie fan.
You and your adrenal glands, total cholesterol, and stress junkies!
Like you, the adrenal gland is woefully underestimated and often forgotten. In fact, scientists were so uninspired upon discovering this gland, they named it merely the “gland adjacent to the renal gland” and voila, the adrenal gland.
Nowadays, we better appreciate the value of this gland and we’ve allowed it to pass along its name to one of its key outputs - the adrenaline that helps you mentally and physically when you’re in one of those challenging, stressful situations that you thrive on.
That adrenaline is produced by the inside of these glands (they come in pairs, a right and a left) taking us to how your love of couponing twins you with the adrenal gland. You’re a bargain lover and those deals don’t come better than a “buy one get one free” - exactly what you get with the adrenal gland, two glands for the price of one!
The inner, adrenaline-producing gland is actually a bit of your nervous system that got smooshed together with an outer, hormone-producing region that makes:
· Cortisol - involved in processes as varied as growth, memory and inflammation.
· Aldosterone - crucial for the regulation of your blood sodium and potassium, and consequently, the well-being of your sodium- and potassium-dependent your nervous system.
These two hormones, along with the reproductive hormones, testosterone, estrogen and progesterone made principally in the gonads, are all steroid hormones and all made from cholesterol – that’s why you and your adrenal glands love all things cheesy!
And Lizzo’s song, Juice? A little sneaky this one but hear a gym rat talking about juicing and they’re not discussing their post-workout fruit smoothie but the muscle-building anabolic steroids (testosterone) they’re using. Whilst it’s true that males produce most of their testosterone in their testes, in both sexes, the adrenal glands make a little extra “juice” to throw into the mix!
Aah, you and your kidneys, united in your passion for plasma!
And just like those female athletes, the kidneys do so much and are so underestimated.
We all know the kidneys make urine but did you know they also help regulate blood pressure, rid the body of drugs like antibiotics and activate the vitamin D that your salmon passion delivered to your gut? That ctivated vitamin D is essential if calcium is going to be able to move from your gut into your blood stream and from there, into your bones, to make and keep, a lovely strong skeleton.
Like you, the kidneys really, really like blood - between the two of them, they filter all your blood around three hundred times every 24 hours. This constant filtering moves body waste products into urine and ultimately, out of the body! Through their production of the bone-marrow nudging hormone, EPO (erythropoietin), your kidneys are vital to the process of making red blood cells. Spend time in the thinner air at altitude and your kidneys help increase red blood cell production, helping you to move more oxygen through the body.
Your kidneys’ working day looks rather like yours i.e relatively steady with additional bursts of activity when you indulge in a second coffee or a salty snack! Nighttime is kidney quiet time when they rather handily slow their urine production right down so that hopefully, you won’t have to get up for a pee!! Unsung heroes, right?
Finally, you and your kindred organ share an interest in stones. However, as the pain of passing a kidney stone is often described as worse than childbirth, we’re assuming your interest doesn’t extend as far as wanting to be one of the 10% of people who develops these calcium-filled pebbles ;)
A shared dedication to work, exercise and salads, that’s what hitches you to your heart.
Just like your heart, you never want to vacation because you live to work - you both know that the company you work for, wouldn’t survive let alone thrive without you.
You enjoy heart-healthy habits. Your love of microorganism-filled kimchi and salads full of antioxidants and healthy fats is greatly appreciated by the heart and blood vessels and your passion for walking might be even better for your heart than running – so keep it up!
Talking of passion, you treasure Noah and Allie’s decade-spanning love story and although rare, it’s true, people can die of a broken heart. If your heart ever fails and you need CPR, let’s hope your good Samaritan loves the Bee Gees – if they make those chest compressions singing along to ‘Stayin’ Alive’ you could be three times more likely to survive.
The power of music, eh?!
And finally, choosing King James, an athlete with a heart in every sense of the word confirms how much you identify with your perfect pump, because from his extensive charity work to his NBA player #1 stamina rating, LeBron is all heart.
And it’s quite the heart - on court, sprinting end to end, his heart is likely to be pumping out a whopping 40 L of blood every minute, especially impressive when you consider that he probably has only around 8L of blood!
Caring, quiet and retired, that’s you and your thymus.
Located behind your sternum on top of your heart, the thymus gland is an organ very few people know how to find, maybe because even when it was at its largest, during your horrific teenage years, your thymus was only the size of a small business card.
Essential for the production of a type of white blood cells called T-cells, a thymus gland works 24/7 for a couple of decades, making and shipping out T-cells to various depots all over the body: places like your tonsils, those lymph nodes (people call them glands, they’re not!) in your neck that swell when you have mono, even the walls of your gut. For the rest of your life, T-cells can be mobilized from these various depots to fight infection and your thymus gland, its work completed during adolescence, turns to fat (yes, really) and lives out its retirement.
Both you and your thymus love vitamin A-filled sweet potato fries. The thymus needs this vitamin to do its stuff so when you need a change from those fries, throw some carrots and broccoli on your plate – your thymus will love you for it 😊
(Of course, if your teen years are a long way behind you, you still need vitamin A in your diet, but probably not for your shrivelled-up thymus gland.)
You sobbed over “Dallas Buyers Club” with its heart-rending history of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) wreaks its mayhem by selectively seeking out and destroying the thymus-produced T-cells, leaving AIDS patients without an effective immune system. Dr. Anthony Fauci’s coronavirus wisdom has you swooning today but his huge body of work in immunology goes back to the AIDS global epidemic when after a tricky start, patients and activists came to love him too – not such an odd crush then!
Wow, you and your liver, what a pair of variety-loving, multi-talented workaholics!
Variety’s your middle name and just like the liver, you embrace that variety in everything, from what you eat to what you do.
For both you and your liver, a pepperoni pizza hits all the major food groups, carbohydrates, protein and fats – your liver loves, uses and stores them all!
Compared with your liver, even with his 4:30am starts, Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, looks like a part-timer. Here’s a typical daytime to-do list for your liver:
· Get involved in fat digestion.
· Make new clotting factors so that you don’t bleed to death.
· Break down and get rid of that beer/Tylenol/contraceptive pill that you swallowed.
But when you’re sleeping, it’s even more creative, making most of the cholesterol that your body uses to make hormones and new cells (yup, you read that right, our diet only contributes around 25% of the cholesterol in our blood - the liver makes the rest!) as well as the glucose for the “I only eat carbs” brain to use until breakfast arrives!
A healthy liver is, therefore, an exceedingly busy liver and a failing liver that can’t keep up with its massive to-do list will ultimately cause serious health issues. Weirdly though, many of the problems develop quietly, without any outward warning signs. What sends many people to their Doctor is, instead, their partner insisting that they can’t stand to watch their loved one scratching their horrendously itchy skin for another seven seconds, let alone seven years! That seemingly trivial sign could just be the result of a change in laundry detergent, but it could also signal liver disease so if happens to you, don’t be embarrassed to get it checked!
Okay, let’s finish on a positive note.
Like Japan after one of its numerous natural disasters, both you and your liver are wonderful at picking yourselves up, dusting yourselves off and getting on with life – even after situations which would’ve floored most of us. The liver isn’t the only organ that can be transplanted from a living donor, but it is the only one where both the transplanted piece and the piece left behind, will both regrow to full size, pretty cool eh?!
