Other factors that influence the type of bacteria in your digestive system include where you live in the world, what health conditions you have and what medications you have received. Digestion begins in the mouth. The food is ground up by the teeth and moistened with saliva to make it easy to swallow. Saliva also has a special chemical, called an enzyme, which starts breaking down carbohydrates into sugars.
Once swallowed, muscular contractions of the oesophagus massage the ball of food down into the stomach. The food passes through a sphincter, or small muscle ring, into the stomach. Here it is mixed with gastric juices. The stomach is a muscular bag and it churns the food to help break it down mechanically as well as chemically. The food is then squeezed through a second sphincter into the first part of the small intestine, called the duodenum.
Once in the duodenum, the food is mixed with more digestive enzymes from the pancreas and bile from the liver. Food is then squeezed into the lower parts of the small intestine, called the jejunum and the ileum. Nutrients are absorbed from the ileum, which is lined with millions of finger-like projections called villi. Each villus is connected to a mesh of capillaries. This is how nutrients pass into the bloodstream. The pancreas is one of the largest glands in the human body.
As well as digestive juices, it secretes a hormone called insulin. Insulin helps to regulate the amount of sugar in the blood. Diabetes is a condition caused by problems with insulin production.
Once all the nutrients have been absorbed, the waste is moved into the large intestine, or bowel. Water is removed and the waste faeces is stored in the rectum.
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Accessed Nov. Naish J, et al. The alimentary system. In: Medical Sciences. Elsevier; The digestive system. International Foundation for Gastrointestinal Disorders. The pancreas makes juices that help the body digest fats and protein. A juice from the liver called bile helps to absorb fats into the bloodstream. And the gallbladder serves as a warehouse for bile, storing it until the body needs it. Your food may spend as long as 4 hours in the small intestine and will become a very thin, watery mixture.
It's time well spent because, at the end of the journey, the nutrients from your pizza, orange, and milk can pass from the intestine into the blood.
Once in the blood, your body is closer to benefiting from the complex carbohydrates in the pizza crust, the vitamin C in your orange, the protein in the chicken, and the calcium in your milk.
Next stop for these nutrients: the liver! And the leftover waste — parts of the food that your body can't use — goes on to the large intestine. The nutrient-rich blood comes directly to the liver for processing. The liver filters out harmful substances or wastes, turning some of the waste into more bile. The liver even helps figure out how many nutrients will go to the rest of the body, and how many will stay behind in storage.
For example, the liver stores certain vitamins and a type of sugar your body uses for energy. At 3 or 4 inches around about 7 to 10 centimeters , the large intestine is fatter than the small intestine and it's almost the last stop on the digestive tract. Like the small intestine, it is packed into the body, and would measure 5 feet about 1. The large intestine has a tiny tube with a closed end coming off it called the appendix say: uh-PEN-dix.
It's part of the digestive tract, but it doesn't seem to do anything, though it can cause big problems because it sometimes gets infected and needs to be removed. Like we mentioned, after most of the nutrients are removed from the food mixture there is waste left over — stuff your body can't use. This stuff needs to be passed out of the body. Can you guess where it ends up?
Well, here's a hint: It goes out with a flush. Before it goes, it passes through the part of the large intestine called the colon say: CO-lun , which is where the body gets its last chance to absorb the water and some minerals into the blood. As the water leaves the waste product, what's left gets harder and harder as it keeps moving along, until it becomes a solid.
Yep, it's poop also called stool or a bowel movement. The large intestine pushes the poop into the rectum say: REK-tum , the very last stop on the digestive tract.
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