The Human Body's Messenger: The Hormonal System While you read
these pages, countless processes take place in your body without
any trouble and you don't feel anything reflecting their true
complexity. The number of times your heart beats in a second,
the rate of calcium in your bones, the sugar level in your
blood, the amount of water your kidneys filter every minute and
many other details like these are realized as the result of the
harmonious working of the cells in your body. Not just a
hundred, a thousand or a million of them; there are about 100
trillion cells in your body. What, then, provides the harmony
among this number of cells? The answer is, your body's hormonal
system. The pea-sized pituitary gland controls and regulates the
production of many hormones throughout the body. It also
oversees the other glands and keeps hormone levels in check. It
works under the control of the region of the brain called the
"hypothalamus." The pituitary gland looks like a piece of meat.
It senses, because of data c