My Digestive Story
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- My Digestion Story!
- My PERSONAL digestive story starts waaayyyy before the actual physiology of it all! It starts in my brain…..thinking about that first cup of coffee in the morning, paired with a Tim Hortons Wild Blueberry Muffin, to a not too often, special dinner of a big fat juicy ribeye steak, smothered with onions and mushrooms, then paired with mashed potatoes and green beans. Ahhhhh….are you salivating yet? I am and that is what is needed to help break down this food the minute it enters your mouth. By mechanically chewing, with the help of my lower jaw, mandible, and breaking down the food with my teeth, an enzyme called amylase, in my saliva, digests starches in my food. Savoring the flavor as much as I can before swallowing this delicious delicacy, my chewed up food turns into a churned up ball called bolus. Although I have always thought my tongue was for tasting and speaking, I now know it has a more important job of pushing the bolus to the back of my mouth. As the VERY old saying goes, “Over the lips and past the gums, look out stomach, here it comes”, the pharynx helps push the bolus down the esophagus. Rhythmic contractions of the muscles continue to move my chewed up, $30 steak down to my stomach.
- Once all that meat lands in my stomach, it is mixed with gastric juices, then stomach muscles pulverize this into a milky, thick sludge called chyme. Like sands through the hourglass, chyme slowly makes its way through the pyloric sphincter, which is located at the bottom of the stomach. From there, my once hefty, juicy piece of steak, (ahhh, memories of mere hours ago), which has turned to chyme, drops into the duodenum. Here it is mixed with secretions from the gallbladder and pancreas. My “food” continues its belly journey from emptying out of the duodenum through the ileum. It now has hit the small intestine which has small folds that aid in a large absorption area. These folds are called villi and microvilli. This ends in digestion which breaks down the “food” into even smaller components which enter the bloodstream. From here, any undigested food passes through the large intestines in a one way valve called the caecum. There are 3 parts to the large intestine which include caecum, colon and rectum. The colon has to be “more important” than anyone else, so he has 4 parts to him which include: ascending colon, travers colon, descending colon and sigmoid colon. The large intestine has more bacteria, including gut flora, in it than we have cells in our entire body! (Told you Mr. Colon was important!) This bacteria helps ferment any undigested foods which then produce chemicals such as Vitamin K and fatty acids.
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