What keeps your body alive? How does it know to do what it does to keep you healthy?

Keeping your core body temperature stable is vital to our survival. It needs to stay at 37.5 C. Even at rest your body generates enough energy to run a light bulb. If you get up to a sprint and you’re extremely fit, you’ll have enough energy to boil a kettle. We obviously need to shed that heat, otherwise you would literally boil yourself, so our bodies have a very efficient way of keeping us cool which is sweating. If you prevent yourself from sweating you could die quite quickly.

We grow more in the first few months of our life than at any other time. We grow 30cm in the first year. If you continued growing at that rate, you’d end up about 10 feet tall by the age of 10!

The more energy your brain demands, the less your body grows, so in childhood the brain demands a huge amount of energy which slows down body growth.

For the past few decades science believed that our short term memories were formed first, then after a period of time they are transferred deeper into the brain to become long term memories. Research is now finding that both short and long term memories are imprinted at exactly the same time. It takes about two weeks for a long term memory to be formed and the short term memory to fade.

There is no prime age for a human being either. Peak physical performance could be viewed as being in your twenties, but now we are seeing competitive sports people performing outstandingly well into their forties. The brain,however,performs better when it is younger.

It may well be many years before we fully understand how and why all of these systems function, one thing is for sure though, good diet and plenty of exercise will definitely preserve our good health well into our older years.