We’ve all been there. You’re at a dinner, conference or maybe you’re on social media scrolling, and the topic of digestive system function comes up.
Maybe, you felt like the odd person out so you didn’t want to admit you were fuzzy on some details. Let’s clear the air and get things in the clear, focusing on the digestive system function, as embarrassing as it may be to address.
Table of Contents:
- What Exactly *Is* the Digestive System?
- Why Digestive System Function is Critical
- How Our Digestive System Function Works: Step-by-Step
- A Deep Dive into Breaking Down Food
- After Digestion: What Now?
- How Our Bodies Orchestrate Digestive System Function
- Conclusion
What Exactly *Is* the Digestive System?
The digestive system is a group of organs that take in food, break it down and remove the waste. It allows your body to get the nutrients and energy it needs. The gastrointestinal tract (GI tract) is the actual series of hollow organs making the long tube .
This journey goes from your mouth to your anus, connecting all the vital processing centers along the way. Solid organs like the liver, pancreas, and gallbladder also play a critical part to our digestive system function.
The Major Players in Digestion
The gi tract’s lineup reads like a digestive system all-star team. It starts at your mouth then connects all the following critical organs:
- Mouth
- Esophagus
- Stomach
- Small Intestine
- Large Intestine
- Anus
That’s the core team, so what about the others? Don’t forget the supporting players; the liver, pancreas, and gallbladder also all contribute.
Why Digestive System Function is Critical
You need the nutrients you take in through your mouth, food and drink. They give you what’s required to function and feel healthy. Those amazing proteins, fats, carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals, and water are the things we require.
Your digestive system breaks those nutrients down to sizes that your body can use. After broken down it allows your body to make new cells, energy and other growth.
Breaking It All Down
Proteins break down into simple amino acids. Then, your fats break down into fatty acids and glycerol. Even carbohydrates reduce down to the most basic forms, sugars.
Here is a summary of those details:
| Nutrient | Breaks Down Into |
|---|---|
| Proteins | Amino Acids |
| Fats | Fatty Acids and Glycerol |
| Carbohydrates | Simple Sugars |
Getting the proper nutrients that match our needs is what our system needs. If not we can quickly feel lethargic or other long-term common symptoms of problems.
How Our Digestive System Function Works: Step-by-Step
Each part of your system has an important job to support this complicated process of breaking food down to use for energy. We should take a closer look at the journey and understand the various digestive system components.
The Journey Through the GI Tract
Peristalsis helps with food and liquids to keep it flowing along our digestion highway. Peristalsis makes wave-like motions in the organs to move everything.
The muscles contract so it all continues forward and prevents build ups. At that same time, muscles ahead are relaxed.
From Mouth to Esophagus
From the start of digestion as you chew food and swallow the food passes by your epiglottis, which helps prevent choking. This allows it into your esophagus automatically with muscle movement called peristalsis.
The Stomach’s Role in Digestion
The stomach has two areas to the muscle there that contributes two key areas to digestion. There’s a area that allows the food in, but also a muscle section that does the mixing.
It mixes our foods with stomach acids that really breaks everything down before heading to the small intestine. Once food is fully mixed and ready, it slowly releases into your small intestine.
Small Intestine: Where Absorption Happens
From there your muscles and digestive juices from the pancreas, liver, and intestine push forward what needs more breakdown. Water and those crucial nutrients absorb nutrients to our bloodstream.
Anything leftover starts making their way through. Theprocess involves moving products into the large intestine to be prepared for our next restroom trip.
Large Intestine: Waste Processing
Food waste products get prepped for excretion as feces. In our large intestine, more water moves from our digestive organs work to the bloodstream. This really prepares all the “trash” for its final exit.
The Role of the Rectum
Stool gets stored in our rectum. Eventually when our body is ready, everything pushes down.
The poop leaves the body through the anus.
A Deep Dive into Breaking Down Food
Chewing mixes foods, while also combining key ingredients, enzymes, bile and stomach acids. Here is how food gets reduced so our body can use it:
Mouth: It all starts in your mouth where juices mix and things breakdown and start going down. Here enzymes break down those starches from your meals.
Stomach: When foods reaches your stomach lining, acids start turning them into building blocks your body craves. Acids break proteins, too.
Pancreas: Next, digestive liquids flow into the small intestine, too, all supporting the pancreas. The juices from our pancreas get transported to the right place to work with the biliary tract . This makes sure our starches, fats and carbs, along with proteins are good to go.
Liver: Fats get extra breakdown with digestive “soap” produced by your liver, and called, bile. Our body wisely stores up reserves of the fats after meals for later use by using the bile ducts .
Small Intestine: From there the small intestine brings more ingredients to further reduce particles to sizes our body loves.
Your small intestine absorbs most of the nutrients. It pulls water from our circulation, breaking things down for our benefit by utilizing all of our blood vessels .
Large Intestine: Finally, our large intestine pulls even more fluids. Even microbes here help digest food .
After Digestion: What Now?
Once fully broken down into particles, they become energy stores or building blocks of all cells.
Amino acids get sent around our bodies, including to our liver, and our system function improves.
Here’s how the building block get used: Your liver uses nutrients like amino acids, sugars, glycerol, and vitamins to build what your system craves. It knows what and when things need replacement. Our incredible lymph system function picks up and delivers crucial fatty acids to all areas of our body.
How Our Bodies Orchestrate Digestive System Function
A partnership between hormones and nerves works wonders when things are smooth. Signals constantly make the digestive dance possible.
The Hormonal Connection
Key hormones produced in your stomach and small intestine lining direct digestive processes. Cells in our gut release those chemical messengers which cause critical liquids.
They send signals, so we either speed up things with faster transit, or decrease it. Our pancreas chimes in, manufacturing more important messengers that our body systems have uses for too.
The Nervous System’s Influence
We also have our central nervous system involved with the control our digestive system processes. You know how your mouth waters when you smell food and that amazing pizza coming?
It’s a preparation your brain triggers. Inside your GI tract, something fascinating exists; we have the Enteric Nervous System (ENS).
The walls stretch from all the incoming foods, those amazing signals flow around. This allows things to either slow, pause or speed up. Your digestive system works better thanks to this internal “highway” constantly keeping things flowing, contracting all the core digestive muscles.
Conclusion
The detailed overview helps us better appreciate everything happening, from taking bites of delicious meals to extracting particles, all part of our digestive system function.
As intricate as our body has arranged, there are potential common digestive disorders that you might have in your digestive health. Understanding digestive system functions and being aware of issues like constipation, diarrhea, and conditions such as inflammatory bowel disease and irritable bowel syndrome is important for your health. This allows you to really improve that entire operation.
