Digestion

You bite into an apple, chew, and swallow. But the apple is far from finished. It starts a long journey through your body, on which it gets broken down into tiny building blocks. Only those building blocks are something your body can really use.

The path of the food

The journey starts in the mouth. The teeth crush the food, the saliva makes it slippery. The food pipe then pushes the mush into the stomach with waves of muscle, which works even when you stand on your head. In the stomach it gets mixed thoroughly and broken down further. After that it moves into the small intestine and finally into the large intestine.

Breaking down and absorbing

The breaking down is done by tiny helpers called enzymes. They cut the large nutrients into small pieces, the way scissors cut a long ribbon. The first enzymes are already in the saliva, but most of them work in the stomach and the small intestine. In the stomach a strong acid helps as well: it kills many germs and loosens the food up. Water plays an important role too, because it keeps everything moving and dissolves the building blocks.

The small intestine as gate to the blood

The key step happens in the small intestine. Here the small building blocks pass through the gut wall into the blood. The blood then delivers them to all the cells of your body. In the large intestine mostly water is recovered, and the rest is left over as waste.