The Digestion Journey

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What is digestion?

Digestion comes from the word that means to divide. When food is digested it is divided into smaller and smaller parts.

The digestion journey begins when you take a bite of food and begin to chew it. Your teeth and tongue grind up the food and the food mixes with the saliva in your mouth. That makes it easier to swallow. When you swallow the mashed up food it goes into your esophagus. The food does not just go down the esophagus but is pushed along by muscle action, the way toothpaste is squeezed out of a tube. That is why you can swallow your food even when you are hanging upside down.

When the food is in the esophagus it travels into the stomach. The walls of the stomach move in and out, mixing and mashing the food into a thick liquid. After the food mixture leaves your stomach it travels through a very long tube called the small intestine. The small instestine is coiled up in your body, but if you stretched it out it would be almost twenty feet long! In the small intestine, food is broken down into tiny pieces so that the body cells can use them. Your body keeps food in the small intestines until it is well digested.

Once your food is broken down into tiny molecules it is stopped in the small intestines by tiny, hairy, fingerlike things called villi. Your villi suck in and absorb all of the usable food and give it to your blood.  The villi help to pass the waste down to your large intestine. After your food is digested it is ready to go to work for you in your blood. Your large intestines gets the waste products from your small intestine. The large intestine is about 5 feet long. After the waste is pushed through your large intestine it is pushed out of your body through your rectum.

It take about twenty-four hours for your food to travel from your mouth to your rectum!