The Digestion Process

by Mariana Bozesan

The body needs to be able to absorb what it requires to function and eliminate the excess and toxins. It does this through the digestive system.
Improper digestion prevents the body from acquiring the nutrients it needs while it allows toxins to build-up in the body.

This leads to significant metabolic disorders throughout the body such as food reactions, the dysfunction of the glands that control fat burning and lack of energy, which in turn result in weight gain. Therefore, if we want to lose weight, we need to understand how to make our digestive systems function effectively.

The food we eat cannot be directly used by the body as nourishment. Our food and drink must be changed into smaller molecules of nutrients before they can be absorbed into the blood and carried to cells throughout the body. Digestion is the process by which food and drink are broken down into their smallest parts so that the body can use them to build and nourish cells and to provide energy.

The digestive system is a series of hollow organs joined in a long, twisting tube from the mouth to the anus. Inside this tube is a lining called the mucosa. In the mouth, stomach, and small intestine, the mucosa contains tiny glands that produce juices to help digest food.

In addition, there are two solid digestive organs, the liver and the pancreas, which produce juices that reach the intestine through small tubes. Parts of other organ systems (for instance, nerves and blood) also play a major role in the digestive system.

Digestion involves the mixing of food, its movement through the digestive tract, and chemical breakdown of the large molecules of food into smaller molecules. It begins in the mouth, when we chew and swallow, and is completed in the small intestine. The food is moved from the mouth through the esophagus into the stomach within seconds. In the stomach, the food spends up to three and a half hours being digested after which it is passed to the small intestines where the nutrients are absorbed within minutes and passed on to the large intestine where it spends hours being dehydrated before elimination.

When the food then enters the stomach it has three tasks to do.

1. The stomach must store the swallowed food and liquid. This requires the muscle of the upper part of the stomach to relax and accept large volumes of swallowed material.



2. It mixes up the food, liquid, and digestive juice produced by the stomach by its muscle movement.



3. The stomach empties its contents slowly into the small intestine after a certain amount of time.

Several factors affect the emptying of the stomach into the small intestine, including the nature of the food (mainly its fat and protein content). As the food is digested in the small intestine and dissolved into the juices from the pancreas, liver, and intestine, the contents of the intestine are mixed and pushed forward to allow further digestion.

Finally, all of the digested nutrients are absorbed through the intestinal walls. The waste products of this process include undigested parts of the food, known as fiber, and older cells that have been shed from the mucosa. These materials are propelled into the colon, where they remain, usually for a day or two, until the feces are expelled by a bowel movement.