23 Gruesome Scientific Facts That Will Make You Squirm

Image via Giphy

The human body is a mysterious thing to us non-scientist folk. We walk around everyday going about our boring business while weird and gross sh*t is going down inside our meat sacks unbeknownst to us. Like, I’m not sure if I wanted to know that there are tiny mites living on my eyelashes at all times, but now I do and now I have to dream about little bugs decorating their living rooms and painting their walls with my 6 month old mascara. Yuck.

Scientific ignorance is bliss, but do we really want to live our lives with our head in the clouds? Nah. I’d rather know that my vaginal fluid is made out of mucous and plasma and use that sh*t to freak people out. Like, I’m definitely going to whip out that little factoid the next time a guy starts going down on me. I’ll lay back while his eyes widen and the horror takes over and then realize how much of a freak and sadist I am. But I digress.

If you’re looking to be the hit at a party, I suggest you learn some hilarious jokes and bring good alcohol. If you’re trying to be the weirdo in the corner who’s explaining to some poor schmuck about how tumors can grow their own teeth — then please, be my guest and use this list of shocking and disgusting facts to exacerbate your freaky status to the next level. Who knows, someone might be as into learning about the amount of skin you lose in your lifetime as much as you are!

These 21 disgusting facts about the human body will make you wince:


1.

After giving birth ladies are advised they don’t need to tell the doctor about the huge clots falling out their vagina until they’re bigger than a lemon.

2.

You have a friendly symbiotic relationship with bacteria in your gut that keeps you healthy and helps you digest food. When you die, they will eat you.

3.

When you blush, the lining of your stomach blushes too.

4.

Retrograde ejaculation. As a male ER triage phone nurse, I used to get calls from freaked out guys thinking they broke themselves. You get the complete sensation of orgasm, but nothing comes out. It goes into the bladder instead. The next time you pee, the urine comes out foamy. It’s usually a side-effect of certain medications.

5.

If one is born with the inability to breakdown 1 single amino acid (phenylalanine), they will become mentally retarded when they grow older if they continue to eat foods containing it.

6.

Three hundred million of your cells die every minute.

7.

Eating more than 6oz of escolar (also known as butterfish) will you give you super orange, oily diarrhea. Said diarrhea is so liquidy that it feels like passing gas when it comes out, so you’ll probably shit yourself too. Some countries have banned the sale of said fish.

8.

If our body stopped making mucus, our stomach would slowwwwly digest itself.

9.

A woman’s uterus can fall out of her vagina if the muscles are too weak.

10.

If you could scrunch together all the bacteria living on the outside of your body, they would take up about the same amount of space as a pea.

11.

We all have mites in our eyelashes which embed their heads into your hair follicles.

12.

Humans shed 40 pounds of skin in their lifetimes.

13.

Burning human smells of pork. I think we also taste like it, but I can’t confirm that from experience.

14.

We are deuterostomes. I like to tell people that they were an asshole before they were anything else.

15.

Getting a massage is actually breaking down tissues ever so slightly.

16.

Your body can turn against itself in auto-immune disorders effectively killing itself trying to protect itself.

17.

That when you need to shit really badly as a dude, it puts pressure on your prostate which can cause you to get an erection.

18.

Some tumors can grow teeth.

19.

The spinal cord is exactly the same texture as a vienna sausage, and preserved human tissue looks like pulled pork. Bone dust smells like Cool Ranch Doritos.

20.

Vaginal fluid is a combination of plasma and mucus.

21.

Everyone has cancer. Everyone. In fact, most people develop “cancer” multiple times a day. Luckily our immune systems are advanced enough to kill these cancerous cells early. Only the unlucky end up with clinical cancer. Also, if people could not die of “old age” and ailments like heart disease were eradicated, everyone’s eventual cause of death would be cancer due the limited life span of the immune system.

Written by Laura McNairy

Laura is a freelance writer for TFLN. She likes to write about what she knows best — dating, sex, and being awkward, but usually in the opposite order. She is the Assistant Editor and videographer for Peach Fuzz, a sex-positive nudie magazine in ATX.