Ever wondered what your digestive system looks like from the inside? Well, here is a handy graphic, complete with a smiling mouth and teeth.
Your digestive system is responsible for allowing you to process all of the food and fluids that your body takes in. Without it, we wouldn't survive very long. In fact, we wouldn't survive at all. Our systems are complex processes that have evolved over the centuries to work all on their own. Ultimately, we don't need gravity for our digestion to work. The digestive process works on its own, forcing food through our body, and flowing it through the gastrointestinal (GI) tract. Ultimately, it is this flowing process that breaks down the food (contrary to popular belief, the stomach isn't primarily responsible for digestion.
The whole process starts (obviously) with your mouth. Which is helpfully represented in the graphic by a set of smiling lips. Your teeth chew the material (hopefully, food) and send it down to your small intestine. As food passes through, it is mixed with your digestive juices (sounds yummy, no?). This causes the large molecules of food to break down into smaller molecules. The body then absorbs these smaller molecules through the walls of the small intestine, and the molecules travel into the bloodstream, which delivers them to the rest of the body. Waste products of digestion pass through the large intestine and out of the body as a solid matter (poop).
Poop seems very simple, and childish, and funny (to me, at least). Yet, there is a lot in it that makes it a much more complex subject. Our feces, as we know, is made up of waste that our body discards. Depending on your metabolism, each bowel movement weighs about 100 to 250 grams (or about .5lbs). As surprising as it might be, feces is made of many constituents. To begin, 75% of feces consists mostly of water. Yes, you read it right. It’s just plain old water. The 25% left is solid matter. Learn more about this process here.
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