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Published by The Herb School |
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What I do in your body... The Urinary System does quite a few things for you, but the main thing it does is to control the body fluid concentrations and filters wastes from the blood. The organs that do this work are your Kidneys. Standard Issue are two per person, although some people get along just fine with one. Inside each kidney are about one million nephrons and each nephron helps filter the blood. The blood that flows through the kidneys is full of wastes such as carbon and oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen. Your kidneys are bean-shaped organs that weigh about five ounces each, but they do a big filtering job. The nephrons (filters) stretched out end to end would be approximately 50 miles long. These filters in your kidneys pull water, salts and glucose from the blood. Your red blood cells and proteins are too large to go through the filters. These filters are very selective, they don't allow urea and other poisonous substances back into the bloodstream, but they do allow some water, salt and glucose back into the bloodstream. Urea combines with water to form urine. When more water is reabsorbed in the kidneys, the urine becomes more concentrated. The ureters connect the kidneys with the bladder. Your bladder is simply a storage place that can stretch to hold the urine until you can expel it from your body. It's shaped much like a pear when it's empty and becomes oval when it fills with urine. The bladder normally can hold an average of about one pint of urine. Your kidneys are very busy, they filter about 300 pints of fluid each day. You excrete about 2 ½ pints as urine each day, the rest is recycled. Another big job that your urinary system does is to keep the fluid balance in your body in correct ratio. Potassium and sodium are crucial to this balance. Over half of the water in the body is inside the cells, the rest is mixed with salt, a bit like diluted sea water. To keep the cells healthy, the proper concentration of salts is needed. Did you know that if you put blood cells into tap water that they well swell and burst? If you put these blood cells into a solution of 5% salt, they'll shrink and wrinkle up. So you can see that the proper balance of minerals in your blood is crucial to your health. WHAT CAN GO WRONG? A lot of women will tell you that water retention is one of the biggest problems that they must deal with; in medical circles this problem is called edema. When your kidneys don't do their job very well, toxins and irritants cause inflammation and that leads to swelling all over the body. You'll notice it most in your extremities, hands and feet, fingers and toes. Many notice it around their waist line too. A substance that causes the kidneys to flush more water from the blood stream is called a diuretic, and drug diuretics can take a lot of potassium with the excess water, leaving you extremely tired and listless. Herbal diuretics are normally high in natural potassium. |
