The Digestive System

The digestive system has the function of breaking down food, absorbing the good parts from it and disposing of the waste. This cycle takes many organs working together to be able to help your body function. Of all the organs, the five major organs in the system are; the oesophagus, the stomach, the liver and the small and large intestine.

Once your teeth finished grinding the food into smaller parts, it send its down the back of your throat and enters the oesophagus. The average human has an oesophagus the length of 25 cm or 10 inches long. The job of the oesophagus is to carry the food from your mouth down to your stomach. I guess the simple reason of why it is so long and the stomach isn't higher up is just because our heart, lungs, rib cage etc are up there. The way food travels down the oesophagus is that the muscles contacts and help it come down not too fast and down to the stomach. It typically takes food 2-3 seconds to reach the stomach for food.

Once its reaches the stomach, is sits there in acid and enzymes. The stomach muscles contract periodically, making the digestion easier. For a typical meal, half of what you would ate would leave the stomach and enter the intestines with around 2.5 hours to 3.5 hours. All of the food would would leave the stomach in 4 to 5 hours. The stomach is located around the rib cage area and to the left of the liver.

The liver is an organ which isn't very much thought of. Food doesn't travel through it but it is part of the digestive system. The liver produces a fluid substance called bile. This bile is carried from the bile duct and gallbladder to the pancreas and to the small intestine to help with digestion. The bile helps the body absorb the fat from food to the blood system. The weight of the liver is actually 1.5kg for an average human.

After it has been sitting in the stomach for a couple of hours, it travels down to the small intestine. The small intestine looks like a big mess of tubes going this way and that. It has small lining on the inside called villi which helps it carry the food around. In the small intestine the nutrients, protein and good parts from the food (or liquid) are absorbed from here.

(this is beef but it looks similar)

Surrounding the small intestine is the large intestine. The large intestine absorbs what good is left form the food. It absorbs mainly the water from the food and disposes of the rest. The large intestine is actually 5 ft long or 152cm. It weighs 4 pounds which is roughly 1.8kg. Once it goes through the large intestine the body disposes of it out the other end.