The Digestive System. It is responsible for the well being of your body and sorting out the good from the bad and keeping you functioning properly. When you go for lunch at school you don't necessarily think about what you're eating, all you know is that you eat your lunch and fill up and that by time school finishes you're hungry again. Well, let me tell you that whilst you're running around on the field or in your next class your body is working away to digest that food you've eaten and give you the nutrition your body needs to function and work. We may not be aware of it but this process of digestion is quite a long and complicated one, luckily your body is amazing and can handle it no problem!
Before you even eat the food your body begins to salivate at the mere smell or sight of it, this saliva allows you to break down your food and makes it easier to swallow. These tiny bits of mushed up food are pushed to the back of your mouth by the tongue and down your esophagus to continue its journey into your body. You have a windpipe for breathing and the esophagus to carry down food so your epiglottis (a flap in the back of your throat) directs the mushed up food down the esophagus to carry it to the stomach and ensuring you can continue to breathe. When you eat or drink too fast it can make you cough and people say 'that went down the wrong hole' and this literally means that the epiglottis didn't have time to direct the food into your esophagus and it instead went down your windpipe; the coughing then clears your windpipe of food.
Your food has now reached your stomach where gastric juices help to break down all the food into a liquid. This process removes any bacteria in the food to prevent you falling ill and then passes this liquid on to the small intestine. The small intestine then breaks down the food even further allowing your body to absorb the proteins, fats, carbohydrates etc. within the food you ate. The pancreas, liver and gall bladder assist in this process. Juices from the pancreas help digest fats and protein, bile from the liver helps absorb fats and the gallbladder is the storage place of this bile until it is needed. Your food can spend hours being digested in the small intestine and extracting the nutrients you need; these nutrients then pass on to the liver and meanwhile any waste from the food that your body doesn't need is sent on to the large intestine.
Your liver is an important organ to keep healthy as it cleans up any further waste in these nutrients that the small intestine did not and helps absorb nutrition into the blood aswell as storing vitamins and energy so that you have spare energy in case you decided to exercise and haven't eaten for a while, clever right? Meanwhile over in the large intestine the waste that your body doesn't need is being gotten rid off, yep that's right it's time to move through the colon where any excess waste hardens and becomes poop. This is then passed through the rectum and out the anus and, well, you know the rest. So that's it, your body has successfully digested your food, absorbed what it needed and got rid of the waste in the toilet. Amazing isn't it? All that happens and we're not even aware of it.
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