The human body is simply a biological machine. Just a living “thing” made up of a whole bunch of different parts. Right? Like, parts of it can get worn out like brake pads or spark plugs and we can just replace these “worn out” parts to extend our “useful life,” as it were. But machines don’t heal bruises, cuts, scrapes, or broken bones, and humans do. And these phenomena point to some seemingly hidden truths about the human organism.

We are not really a “thing”… we are more of a phenomenon like a river or a standing wave. From Wikipedia:

In physics, a standing wave, also known as a stationary wave, is a wave that oscillates in time but whose peak amplitude profile does not move in space. The peak amplitude of the wave oscillations at any point in space is constant with respect to time, and the oscillations at different points throughout the wave are in phase.

Here’s a simple visulatization of the idea that I came across on YouTube:

Interesting idea, and while we indeed are almost 80% water, we certainly don’t look it; the liquids that move through us generally do so beneath the surface. The materials that make up our inner structure and outer appearance move through us much more slowly, or at least slow enough as to be imperceptible. Our cells, tissues, organs, bones, etc. are all renewed regularly from the nutrients and minerals absorbed from the food and drink we consume and digest. That means a change in one’s regular daily diet and lifestyle, if kept consistent over time, should result in a renewed physical form.

The table below presents a variety of cell renewal rates in the human body (unless otherwise noted), and the figure following provides a visual representation of the proportion of cells that make up the human body (from the book “Cell Biology by the Numbers” by Ron Milo and Rob Phillips). As you can see, many of the cell types presented in the table are renewed within a few months, and according to this article at HowStuffWorks (and supported by the table below), the majority of the body’s tissues and organs are completely renewed in 7 to 10 years. That means one could experience effects of a sustained change to one’s regular daily diet and lifestyle in as little as 2 to 3 weeks, with more significant effects in 3 to 4 months, and a complete transformation in 7 to 10 years.

The body is also a community, an entire ecosystem, a whole world unto itself even. It is estimated that the human body is composed of 25,000,000,000,000 to 37,000,000,000,000 cells, and that doesn’t include any bacteria or other inhabitants, which are said to outnumber our cells at a rate of 10 to 1. I will save the inhabitants of our body for another post (or perhaps a few posts), suffice to say that a sustained change in regular daily diet and lifestyle will also effect everything living in and on our body, which in turn impacts the overall condition and experience of our body. We truly are (made up of) what we eat.