Essay About Digestion

The process of digestion is really quite fascinating. I completely understand why you would think that digestion only occurs in the stomach. There are lots of people out there who think that.

One of the first steps of digestion begins in the stomach. The stomach is an organ, which gets the bolus from the esophagus and helps with chemical and mechanical digestion. Now, let’s break that down a little bit. First of all, if you don’t know what the stomach looks like, it is J-shaped. That should make it pretty easy for you to recognize. Okay, so, bolus is a small, circular mass of digested food. The esophagus is a muscular tube that is used to help food and liquids make its way into the stomach. But, the esophagus is not involved with digestion. The mechanical digestion is the breaking down of big chunks of food into smaller chunks. On the other hand, chemical digestion, is a more complicated form of digestion, which break down molecules and passes through the blood stream. So, once again, the stomach gets the mass of digested food from the esophagus and helps with the mechanical and chemical digestion.

I want to start off by talking to you about the stomach in some pretty good detail. Inside the stomach, we have something called the parietal cells. These cells release intrinsic factor and hydrochloric acid. Intrinsic factor is a type of protein, which helps the intestines, a tube that helps digest the food once it leaves the stomach, absorb vitamin B12. Vitamin B12 is part of our diet when we eat meat and drink milk. It is very important because if we don’t have enough in our bodies (or too much) we can get some diseases. So, the intrinsic factor is there to help our bodies take in the vitamin. Then, we have a hormone in our stoma...

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...removing absorbed nutrients. Last but not least, is the hormone enterocrinin. Enterocrinin is also released when chyme enters the duodenum, however, it helps with mucin production. Mucin comes in various forms and one of those forms is saliva.

Okay, now, once the food goes passes through the duodenum, it goes into the second part of the small intestine, the jejunum. A good portion of the chemical digestion and absorption of nutrients happens here. So, this is where nutrients such as carbohydrates, fats, and proteins are absorbed. You get these nutrients from the foods you eat. Once the food goes through the jejunum, it goes into the last part of the small intestines, the ileum. The ileum is the longest part of the small intestine. It ends at the ileocecal valve. The ileocecal valve controls the passage of food from the ileum into the cecum of the large intestine.