Smart Start - Lesson 2

naptime
A normal meal stays in the stomach for about 2 to 3 hours. A big meal may "tummy nap" for 5 hours or more! No wonder you're often wiped out after a large meal for a long time.

No 'Greasy, Grimy Gopher Guts' Spoken Here

Food goes on a grand journey -an internal health trek! – through your body, from when you first ingest it to when you finally get rid of what's left as waste product. This is how you get important energy and nutrients to power your growth during the adolescent years. Without proper digestion (and proper nutrition), your health will suffer. By exploring here, you'll get the scoop on the digestive process and the organs necessary to achieve it. It's not "greasy, grimy gopher guts" but a sharp look on the inside to help you get on track.

FOOD, ITS INCREDIBLE JOURNEY

Keeping your digestive system in great shape by eating lots of healthy foods and drinking water should be a master plan you carry out throughout life. And it's good to start now while you're still growing and building a strong body.

KEEP IN MIND: Greasy or fatty foods (can you say "yummy fast food"?) can be difficult to digest, so attempt to eat these foods in moderation. Eating fruits, vegetables, breads and cereals with bran help the solids bulk up in the large intestine so you can smoothly move out the waste.

Check out the "The Well-Traveled Meal" chart below to see the interesting path food takes -- and how important this whole process truly is!

Your teeth and tongue chop up the food and then it's mixed with saliva.
Food goes down the esophagus into the stomach.
Digestive juices in the stomach break down food into a creamy mixture.
This mixture goes into the small intestine where more juices are added.
The digested food and nutrients are absorbed into your blood through the wall of the small intestine.
The liver processes nutrients by filtering out any harmful substances or wastes before the nutrients can be carried in the blood to the rest of the body.
The undigested food enters the large intestine as a liquid paste. Water is removed from the liquid paste turning what is left into solid waste. The solid waste then leaves the body when you go to the bathroom.


Have gushy fun getting organs in order with ORGANize This, our interactive game in which you take a scrambled mess of digestive organs, straighten them out, answer some questions and get them correctly organized. More fun than playing "Operation," and anatomically correct! Play it now.

More details on the Well-Travelled Meal

Mouth
The mouth has three major weapons for starting the breakdown of our food so that our bodies can use it as energy:

Teeth are responsible for grinding, mashing and chewing the food.
The tongue is the main player in swallowing. It has the power to move and mush the food.
Saliva is mixed with the food to help it continue its journey into the esophagus.

Esophagus
The esophagus is like a stretchy pipe that's about 10 inches long. It connects the mouth to the stomach. When food moves down the esophagus, it goes toward the stomach.

Stomach
Surprisingly, the stomach is not very big, but can stretch to hold a full meal and drink. In order for the stomach to be able to stretch and shrink so often, it must be very muscular. It squeezes and churns the food mixing it with digestive juices (acids and enzymes).

Small Intestine
Here's a fact to impress your friends with: Your small intestine is 20 to 25 feet long! It is twisted, folded and turned many times like a gigantic bowl of spaghetti. The pancreas, the liver and the gallbladder help by sending different juices to the first part of the small intestine. 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. The gallbladder is like a warehouse for this bile, holding onto extra amounts of it when the body needs it. As the thick liquid paste travels through your small intestine, the nutrients (vitamins, minerals, proteins, carbohydrates and fats) from the food can finally pass through the wall of the small intestine into your blood.

Liver
The liver is the first place that the nutrients from food go. The blood brings them directly there before going anywhere else. The liver processes the nutrients by filtering out any harmful substances or wastes. The liver figures out how many nutrients will go to the rest of the body, and how many will stay behind in storage. After everything has passed through the liver for inspection, the nutrients can be carried in the blood to the rest of the body.

Large Intestine
The large intestine is the end of the road for food digestion. After almost all of the nutrients have been absorbed from the liquid food mix in the small intestine, some parts of the food you've eaten will still remain that the body can't use. This leftover waste moves into the large intestine. On its way, it goes into the colon, the part of the large intestine where most of the water that is left in the liquid mix is absorbed into the blood. As the water leaves the mix, the waste that's left gets harder as it moves along, until it becomes a solid. When this solid waste reaches the end of the large intestine, it then collects in the rectum at the end of the large intestine and finally leaves the body through an opening called the anus.

DIGESTION -- THE JOURNEY WITHOUT END

Now you've got a good idea of how your body deals with what you eat. It's a cycle that continues as your dietary needs constantly must be met to keep you alive. You've got to keep your machine energized and fueled up -- that's the way it works, a journey without end. So don't think about digestion and your digestive organs as GROSSOLOGY 101, but instead as all part of an amazing process tied directly to good nutrition and to a lifetime of smart eating decisions.

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