Facts About the Human Foot

You may not know it, but the lowermost part of the human body is at the very end of your legs and ankles. The feet and toes are an essential body part which not only guarantees stability while we are standing up, but are also made up of very curious and relatively unknown facts that make them even more interesting than before.

These structures allow the human body to perform its daily activities like running, walking and jumping. However, their main task is to make the body stand upright. Feet are made up of many intricate parts, such as 26 bones, 33 joints, 107 ligaments and 19 muscles, and over time, they can get seriously injured because of the constant wear and tear. The rest of our bodily activities directly affects the foot and its health. It can also be divided into three different parts or sections:

• Forefoot: containing the phalanges (five toes), and the metatarsals, which are five long bones on top of the foot.
• Midfoot: containing the bones that arches the foot. These bones are the cuneiform, the cuboid and the navicular.
• Hindfoot: made up of the heel (calcaneus), the largest bone of this structure, and the ankle (talus) bones that gives support to the leg bones.

Why feet tend to get so sweaty?

Very often, when we come back home after a long day of walking and standing up, our feet tend to be extremely sweaty and smelly, and this should be no surprise, given the fact that one single foot contains 120,000 sweat glands. 250,000 glands in total, which is more than any other body part, per square-centimeter.

Do you have ticklish feet?

A human foot contains around 4,000 nerves and an even larger number of nerve endings in the proximities of our skin, which is why some people tend to get very ticklish when someone else touches their feet. This is also an indicator of good health; otherwise it could indicate some kind of nerve damage.

Standing can hurt your feet

Even worst, standing in one single spot for a very long time can damage your feet even more than walking many blocks. So, when you put on a few more pounds, your feet suffer greatly. In fact, ever since 1970, the average shoe size has gone up size or two.

How much do we walk on our feet?

Even though runners and other types of athletes go way over this mark, most people walk as much as 100,000 miles in our entire lifetime. This is a lot of stress we carry on them, and the reason why many health conditions such as back pain, spine misalignments and headaches are related to foot problems.

Women’s shoe problem

Ironically, high heel shoes started to be worn by women to achieve a more masculine look; however, nowadays, they cause females almost four times more feet problems as men, who often wear less painful shoe ware.