Hello everyone! I am thrilled to announce that I will once again be miniaturized along with my submarine and take you on another Fantastic Voyage inside the human body. In case you have forgotten the details of our last journey, my sub and I will be shrunken down to be 8 microns long. This time I will be swallowed by Fred, a 55 year old man, while he enjoys a hamburger, French fries, and root beer. As I pilot my way through his body, I will be describing the process of digestion and what major structures I see and come across.
Can you imagine being part of someone’s meal? Neither can I, yet here I am being chewed and mixed with a juicy burger by Fred’s teeth. As Fred enjoys his meal, the first part of digestion is happening in his oral cavity. Fred’s burger is a mixture of carbohydrates, lipids, and proteins. As he chews and moves his food around with the help of his tongue, I can see his saliva coming from different angles and mixing with his food. There are three pairs of salivary glands, the parotids, submandibulars, and sublinguals. They secrete most (about 1L) of the saliva produced each day in an adult. (Thibodeau & Patton, 2008, pg397) Saliva contains mucus and a digestive enzyme called salivary amylase. As you can see here, the process of chewing combined with this mucus is allowing the food to break down into a small bolus. After this process I am now mixed up with the bolus and with the help of Fred’s tongue, I have began moving down into the pharynx and then down to this muscular tube called the esophagus.
The esophagus is a stretchy pipe, about 25 centimeters that carries food and liquids from the throat to the stomach for digestion after it has been chewed and chemically softened in the mouth. (InnerBody, 2013) ...
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Crunch, Crunch, Crunch. As you munch on those first few Cheetos the digestion process begins in your mouth. Here, mechanical digestion begins to reduce the size of the Cheeto and mixes the food particles with saliva. The tongue helps mix and move the pieces of Cheeto throughout the mouth. The salivary glands in the mouth also contribute to the breakdown of the Cheetos in the mouth. They secrete amylase and mucus. The parotid glands begin chemical digestion on the Cheetos. It secretes a clear, watery fluid that is high in amylase. The enzyme, amylase, begins to breakdown carbohydrates into disaccharides. The other two salivary glands, the submandibular and the sublingual, secrete saliva containing mucus, which binds and lubricates the Cheeto particles for easy swallowing. Now the food has been formed into a bolus with the help of saliva, the tongue, and teeth. Next the bolus travels into the pharynx, where the epiglottis closes off the top of the trachea so no food can enter. Then it moves on to the esophagus, where peristaltic waves push the food toward the stomach. The food enters the stomach through the cardiac sphincter at the end of the esophagus.
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The digestive system is interesting, complex and truly important to our daily lives. Without the digestive system energy and nutrients vital to the body could never reach body cells and a person wouldn't be able to do all the things they like to do, such as study, play sports, and hang out with friends. The body uses various organs and chemicals to break down food. The breakdown of food he... ...
Food comes in the mouth, and chewing and saliva start to break it up and make it smaller to swallow. Then, the food goes down through the esophagus to the stomach. Moving of the stomach’s muscular wall keeps going to break down the food. The grinded up food eventually passes
Marieb, E.N., Hoehn, K. 2013. Human Anatomy and Physiology. 9th edition. Pearson Education Inc. ISPN-13: 978-0-321-74326-8.
...ve eaten, to break down the food into a liquid mixture and to slowly empty that liquid mixture into the small intestine. Once the bolus has entered your stomach it begins to be broken down with the help of the strong muscles and gastric juices which are located in the walls of your stomach. The gastric juices are made up of hydrochloric acid, water, and mucus- and the main enzyme inside of your stomach is what is known as pepsin, which needs to be surrounded in an acidic setting in order to do its job, that is to break down protein. Once the bolus has been inside of your stomach for long enough it begins to form into a liquid called chyme, and what keeps the chyme from flowing back into our esophagus are ring shaped muscles known as sphincters located at the beginnings and ends of the stomach and they have the task of controlling the flow of solids and liquids.
Imagine you are eating a sandwich containing wheat bread, ham, lettuce, and Swiss cheese. Do you ever wonder where the nutrients go from all of the previous listed ingredients? Well, when a bite of this sandwich is taken, the mouth produces a saliva enzyme called amylase. This enzyme immediately goes to work by breaking down the carbohydrates that are in the bread. Once, the bite is completely chewed, the contents then are swallowed and go down the esophagus and begin to head towards the upper esophageal sphincter and the is involuntarily pushed towards the stomach. The next passage for the sandwich is to go through the lower esophageal sphincter; which transports the sandwich into the stomach.
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Weston, M. D. Know Your Body: The Atlas of Anatomy. Berkeley, CA: Marshall Cavendish Books Limited, 2005
Mate, G. (2003). When the Body Says No. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
The digestive system is a very important system in the human body. It is a group of organs that work together to turn food into energy and nutrients in the entire body. The food that was chewed in a humans’ mouth now passes through a long tube that is inside of the body that is known as the alimentary canal. The alimentary canal is made of the oral cavity, pharynx, esophagus, stomach, small intestines, and large intestines. Those few things are not the only important accessories of the digestive system there is also the teeth, tongue, salivary glands, liver, gallbladder, and pancreas.
Hi there. My name is Albert and this is my adventurous story of my journey through a human. I was a delicious gourmet hamburger with fresh ingredients like salad, mustard and an angus beef pattie. I was dumped into a family feed box labelled with a massive golden arched ‘M’. Now, I’m quite an intelligent burger, unlike my other food companions and I love studying about the fascinating human digestive system when I went to Burgerton College. I’m here to tell you first-hand about my digestive journey into the human body! Here is a map of the human digestive system for your convenience to pinpoint where I am in my journey as I am recounting my story.