Have you ever wondered what happens to our food after we swallow it? Well, you should know if you are in tenth grade, like me, by now. However, I’m going to go through the step-by-step process of the way our body digests our food. Tonight, I sit down at the dinner table and eat my favorite meal, my dad’s breakfast burritos. Yum…
Your mouth has all the first steps of digestion within it. As I sit at the table and watch my dad begin to distribute the warm scrambled eggs, hash browns, salsa, sour cream, and cheese mixture into three and two tortillas each between us two adults, two teens, two pre-teens, and one six-year-old. Then Dad places three and two pieces of bacon on each plate. Mouth watering yet? Good because that’s just the beginning of the digestive system. As I smell the food, my mouth begins to water with saliva. Then when I grab my plate and sit down, I take a bite. I rip the tortilla apart with my front teeth, and chew the egg-hash brown, etc. concoction while my saliva makes it gooshy. Meanwhile I taste the flavors of the food with my tongue and push the food around with it. I swallow easily; the saliva had made my food easy to swallow.
My first bite then goes down my esophagus to the stomach. Almost, immediately the stomach releases gastric juices to work on digesting the burrito bite. Eventually, the stomach works on until all of the burrito bites are sitting in my stomach. After it secretes and digests all the nutrients and food, the stomach releases the food into small intestine which continues to digest and secrete with the help of the pancreas and liver. Some of the nutrients enter the bloodstream. The rest of the burritos, now pretty much waste, goes through the large intestine and eventually out the body.
~Perrissa
Perrissa's 10th Grade School Blog 