Many have fallen prey to one of the oldest lies about the human body, which says that human blood vessels, when aligned, could travel around the Blue Planet twice.
For more than a century it has been stated that the length of human blood vessels, if lined up in a row, could go around the Earth twice and reach the 100 thousand kilometers.
But this number, repeated in biology textbooks and scientific articles, lacks verified and accurate support, a recent investigation by the popular Science channel demonstrated.
When investigating the origin of this number, the Kurzgesagt team began searching recent scientific publications, but to no avail. They then turned to sources from the 1990s and found mentions in books such as Vital Circuits the Steven Vogel e Looking at the Body by David Suzuki.
While Suzuki’s book does not present a specific reference, Vogel does mention a 1959 Scientific American article which, in turn, cites an earlier work: The Anatomy and Physiology of Capillariesby August Krogh, Nobel Prize winner in 1922.
However, Krogh’s estimate was based on an idealized model of a human body with a large muscle mass of about 143 kg, including 50 kg of pure muscle, a reference that does not represent an ordinary human body.
While Kurzgesagt was carrying out his research, an international team of scientists published a study in the journal Comparative Biochemistry & Physiology, where they estimated the actual length of human blood vessels to be between 9,000 and 19,000 kilometers — measurements that, obtained with modern methods, debunk the myth 100 thousand kilometers.
