Feet are incredibly functional anatomical structures, but they are also pretty weird looking. And it turns out it’s not just their less-than-beautiful appearance that’s weird, because there are a lot of unusual facts relating to our feet.
For starters, our feet contain a quarter of all bones that can be found in the body. This is because each foot has 26 bones, which only harden when you become an adult of around 21 years, Mental Floss reports. But that’s not all, the publication also notes that feet have almost 8,000 nerves in the feet, making them one of the most ticklish parts of the body.
In addition to having 26 bones, and thousands of nerves, each foot also has 33 joints and 100 tendons, as well as 25,000 sweat glands, Everyday Health reports.
Feet are also changing, and within the last 30 years, one of the most significant changes has been in size. According to Everyday Health, in the United States, the most sold shoe size is 8.5 for women and 10.5 for men, which is one size up for both men and women from the best-selling shoe sizes 30 years earlier. Also, when speaking of shoe size we should probably put the myth to bed about a man’s shoe size representing the size of his nether regions. Seriously, a study was done on this, using a sample of 104 men who were measured in 2002 by nurses at St. Mary’s Hospital and University College Hospital in London, The Telegraph reports.
As for your toenails, according to Foot, it takes around 5 to 6 months to grow an entirely new toenail. And around 5 percent of Americans have toenail issues each year. Maybe, that has something to do with the fact that many people don’t even know what shoe size they are, and according to The Telegraph, three-quarters of people wear the wrong size shoe. The reason for this is most people tend to misjudge their size or wear their shoes even when they no longer fit, not taking into account how their foot shape has changed.
And then there is some really strange stuff that has been done with feet, like a foot cheese exhibition in Ireland, which is just as awful as it sounds. According to Mental Floss, in 2013, there was an exhibition in Dublin which displayed several kinds of cheese created using the bacteria samples from people’s feet, as well as other parts of their body like armpits and belly buttons.
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