Fun Facts About Ovaries

Two organs that are the super heroines of the female reproductive system are the ovaries.

1. They are about four centimetres long and lie on either side of the uterus.
2. Your ovaries produce hormones and act as a nursery for immature eggs.
3. Female bodies start making eggs before they’re even born beginning about nine weeks after conception. That means when you’re
   pregnant with the female fetus you’re carrying your future daughter or son and all of your potential future grandchildren.
4. Female babies are born with about 1 million eggs each within its own follicle.
5. By puberty you have about 400,000 eggs.
6. By menopause we only have a few hundred each month.
7. One of your ovaries releases an egg for potential fertilization otherwise known as ovulation.
8. Over the course of the average woman’s lifespan only about four to five hundred eggs will be released.
9. Things that can assure your eggs are in top form include maintaining a healthy body mass index, both underweight or
   overweight can affect your fertility. Ensuring you eat a balanced diet, not smoking, eating lots of antioxidants found in foods like dark
   green veggies and berries helps keep your eggs healthy. Keeping your stress in check and maintaining good sleep habits.
10. Conceiving naturally after age 35 gets increasingly difficult as the quality and quantity of your eggs decline. While doctors can test for the numbers of eggs you have they can’t yet accurately assess the quality of those eggs.
11. A high egg reserve isn’t necessarily a guarantee that you’ll be able to conceive.
12. About eight to fifteen eggs will start to develop around a hundred days before they might be released from the ovaries.
13. About a week after your last period one or two of those egg follicles will continue to grow eventually becoming as large as 2 to 3 centimetres.
14. As you ovulate the egg bursts out of the follicle and floats over to the nearest fallopian tube where it waits to be fertilized but
    it takes years, even decades to mature.
15. If the egg isn’t fertilized in the fallopian tube within 24 hours it dies.
16. As you age the likelihood of your ovaries releasing two eggs at a time increases.
17. The egg is the largest cell in the human body. Sperm is the smallest while every other cell in our body contains our entire
    genome with 46 chromosomes, eggs and sperm only contain 23 each.