You know which foods you love to eat. Have you ever wondered where those foods go after you eat them?
After you put food into your mouth, you begin to chew. As you chew, your teeth mash and grind the food into smaller pieces. While your teeth do their work, your tongue mixes the food with a liquid called saliva. Another word for saliva is spit. Saliva makes the food slippery and mushy. That makes it easier for you to swallow it. Your tongue then pushes the food to the back of your mouth and you are ready to swallow.
Once you swallow your food, it starts on its journey through your body. It travels from your mouth down a tube called the oesophagus. By the time it takes to count to eight, but the food is in your stomach. Here it will be changed so that your body can use it.
Glands produce the saliva, or spit, that makes your mouth wet. Your tongue mixes the saliva with your food. Saliva makes food easier to swallow.
Your stomach continues the job your teeth began. It squeezes, mixes, mashes and adds more liquids to the food. The food stays in your stomach for 2 to 5 hours. By the time it leaves your stomach, it is mostly liquid.
After the liquid food leaves your stomach, it moves down into your small intestine. Here, powerful chemicals and a liquid called bile mix with the food and start to change it.
The food may stay in your small intestine for up to 40 hours. It is no longer what you ate, such as a hamburger or ice cream cone. It has been broken down, or digested , into very tiny pieces. The pieces are so small they can pass through tiny holes in the walls of the small intestine and into the blood. The blood carries the pieces into the cells. There, they help you grow and stay healthy.
The part of the food that your body cannot use is called waste. It moves from the small intestine into another long tube called the large intestine. At the end of the large intestine is the rectum. This waste leaves your body through your rectum.
Picture Credit : Google
