Name: Maya Xu(Xu (18) Class) Class: 5He Date: Friday, March 14, 2014

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Dig In With The Digestive System!

Since 8:00am, you have gone without food. Now, your stomach gurgles noisily like a volcano erupting to get your attention. Lunch time! But as you take a bite of a sandwich, havent you wondered what goes on in your body when you take one a bite of food? Take a journey to the digestive system to find out! The digestive system is the system that nourishes your body. It breaks food down into nutrients that are small enough to be absorbed into your bloodstream, for the nutrients are taken to parts of your body by the circulatory systems red blood cells. The unused waste from food is disposed of with help from the excretory system. Liquid waste is processed in your kidneys and comes out from the urethra. But all these interactions would not happen if not for the nervous and muscular system. When you smell, or even anticipate food, nerves trigger the flow of saliva from your salivary glands in your mouth. The saliva carries hormones and enzymes that break food down in a process of chemical digestion. When you swallow, smooth muscles in a pipe- like organ connected to your stomach called the esophagus push food down into the stomach or up and out of your mouth when you vomit. The digestive system has many extreme organs that do their part diligently. Food takes an amazing journey through them. In the first part, the mouth, hard white objects called teeth chew your food in a process called mechanical digestion, and saliva pumped from your salivary glands

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perform chemical digestion (see above interaction explanation). Your tongue then pushes the mushy, wet mushy food down the esophagus, where no digestion happens, into the stomach. Here, your liver and pancreas assist partner with the stomach, by pumping digestive juices into to itmix with the stomach to mix with the stomachss own, further to digesting the food. This takes about 4 hours. The leftover Leftover juices are stored in the tiny gallbladder located on the liver. This whole four-organ process takes about 4 hours. By now food consists of a blob ofmany molecules called chyme as it enters the small intestine. Here, nutrients are absorbed by tiny hair-like structures called villi (the nutrients go from the villi to the bloodstream). In the large intestine, or colon, water is absorbed from chyme in a process called absorbtion. The remaining waste is transported to the last part of the large intestine, the rectum, and the 12 hour12-hour digestive process ends there with a life- long familiar sound. Flush! Okay, dont get paranoid each time you have a stomach ache, even though appendicitis is pretty common, especially in the 10-30 age groups. One out of seven people could get it. Appendicitis is a disease caused by the inflammation or infection of the appendix, a tiny piece of flesh dangling off the right end of the large intestine. Symptoms of appendicitis are pain is in the middle of the abdomen and the bottom right part of your belly opposite of your stomach, a low fever, diarrhea, loss of appetite, vomiting, nausea and constipation. If the appendix is left untreated, it can burst, spreading harmful bacteria into the body. That disease is peritonitis, which can cause organ failure and even death. Thats why doctors do an appendectomy, an operation that is the removal of the appendix, as soon as they know that the disease is appendicitis.
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Even though diseases like appendicitis are usually not preventable, it is still extremely important that you keep your digestive system healthy. Here are some tips for its health. Dont skip or eat meals too fast. Dont eat too much processed food or sugar. These four bad ideas all lead to digestive difficulty. Drink plenty of water, so you can flush waste out of your system quicker. Make sure you exercise enough, at least 1 hour a day (if you are a student, climbing stairs at school does count!) . Exercising It helps you digest food faster. And eat a variety of foods. If you eat only one type of food all the time, your system soon wont be able to digest anything else. So you wouldnt have all the nutrients you needed. Without the digestive system, we would have to adapt to digesting food a different way. Adapting takes a long time, so we mayight die of malnourishment before we can adapt. So take heed of the tips above. With any luck, no diseases will look at your body as its bed of roses.. With any luck, appendicitis wont come and have you house it!

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