Digestion System
You’ve decided to eat lunch at your desk in order to save time, and you sent out for a pizza and a cold soda. As you sit there finishing the last morsel of your pizza, you wipe your mouth after finishing the soda, and take the garbage to the garbage can and sit back down at your desk ready to tackle more work.
What’s interesting is that your digestion system, that you are rarely even aware of, actually started to work when that delivery guy stepped off the elevator on your floor. You may not have actually been aware of it, but the smell of hot pizza wafted through your office long before you were even aware that he was there.
The smell caused you to begin salivating, and your body interpreted the smell as pizza and thus ordered your body to prepare for the onslaught of crust, pepperoni, cheese, onions and anchovies that was coming down to your stomach. When you finally open up that box and take your first bite of hot pizza your saliva begins to work on the food.
As you chew, it sends chemicals to begin changing the food into what’s known as a bolus. That’s what the chewed up food combined with saliva is called as you use your tongue and your throat muscles to push that food down the esophagus which is really a pipe going to your stomach.
To make sure that food goes into the “right” pipe and not into your windpipe there’s a seal that closes off as you swallow, and that’s called your epiglottis. The epiglottis is also part of your digestion system, as it directs the food the “right” way down. When you perhaps take a drink of something and it enters your windpipe instead of the esophagus, you’ll probably spit up the little amount of drink that “went down the wrong way.”
Once the food reaches the stomach, the stomach does its work, namely taking the bites of wet food that went down the epiglottis and churning it even more to break it up into even smaller pieces.
The mush that was your pizza next enters the small intestine where it is broken down even more so that your body can absorb the fats, carbohydrates, proteins, minerals and vitamins that comes from the food.
The gall bladder, liver and pancreas help your body to break down the food even more. Those too are part of your digestion system. Once your body has delivered all the nutrients to the blood, the large intestine receives the parts that cannot be used. You liver acts as a giant filter at this point. Then the colon gets a chance to pull out any remaining water or nutrients before the “true” waste is created.
Other post you may be interested in reading: gastric problem and hysterectomy recovery
Copyright 2009 GastricBypassSurger-y.com
Gastric Bypass Surgery | Privacy Policy | Contact Us | Sitemap