We all have our reasons for eating nachos at three in the afternoon.

I happen to have
my own and don't ask, it's personal. But more generally, we all eat any kind of food to
accomplish two simple things--to obtain the energy we need to stay alive, and to get
the raw materials required for building all of our tissues and stuff.

That's because when it come down to it, both you and the food you eat contain those
two same things. Both you and food are made of stuff, by which I mean matter, made
of certain kinds of atoms, and both you and food have energy stored in the bonds
between those atoms. So all living things need to take in stuff and energy and convert
it into slightly different stuff and energy. And you can get some of the things you need
pretty easily. Like, in order to get oxygen for respiration to unleash the chemical
energy in your food, you just have to inhale. (Gasp)

But you can't just breathe in the stuff you need to build DNA, or actin, or a
phospholipid bi-layer. So, how does your body really acquire stuff? That's where the
nachos come in. This cheesy, crunchy dish is made of all different kinds of biological
matter like carbohydrates, and fat, and protein, and it contains a certain, probably
shocking, amount of calories, which is how we measure energy stored in the chemical
bonds in food.

So, if I take, like, a hundred calorie bite of nachos, it's probably with this much cheese,
wouldn't be a very big bite, I can convert the chemical energy stored in those
carbohydrates, and proteins and fats to feed my muscle and heart cells, and maybe,
like walk a mile, an activity that happens to use about a hundred calories. But I can't
just swallow the nachos and watch the lump of them travel straight to my heart or leg
muscles.

In order to actually use this food, I have to convert the biological matter into
something my body can work with on the cellular level, which, as you know, is pretty
darn tiny. And work of converting the stuff in food into the stuff in my body is done
by my digestive system.

Human digestion occurs in six main steps, some of which you are intimately familiar
with, others, less so. But every step of the way, your body is working to reduce all the
different kinds of molecules in food into their tiniest and most basic forms. The first
step is uh, probably everybody's favorite. (crunch)

When it comes to what your digestive system ultimately does, just think of it of sort of
a dis-assembly line. You could have an order of nachos, with the works. We're talking
beef, and onions, sour cream and slices of jalapeno and your digestive system will
deconstruct it, both mechanically and chemically one step at a time.

It's gotta do this 'cause your cells work best with materials in their most basic form.
Your digestive system reduces food to that level in two main ways--by physically
smashing it MECANIC to smithereens and by bathing them, as much as it can, in
enzymes CHIMIC.
Enzymes are proteins that living things use as catalysts to speed up chemical reactions.
When used in digestion, enzymes break down the large molecules in your food into
the building blocks that your cells can actually absorb. Those large molecules are
called biological molecules, also known as macro molecules, and everything that you
eat, I hope, is at least partially made of them.

And there are four main kinds. You've got the lipids, the carbohydrates, the proteins,
and the nucleic acids. Each possesses its own density of chemical energy, or caloric
value. Like, for example, one gram of carbohydrate contains about four calories, while
a gram of fat contains about nine calories.

But many of these biological molecules are polymers, or sequences of smaller

molecules, and your cells aren't really equipped to take them up whole. What your
body traffics in are those polymer's individual components called monomers, and there
are four main kinds of those too. Fatty acids, sugars, amino acids, and nucleotides.

POLIMERI___________________ENZIME_____________________MONOMERI

 LIPIDE ACIZI GRASI

 GRASIMI GLUCOZA
 PROTEINE AMINO ACIZI
 ACIZI NUCLEICI NUCLEOTIDE

The simple idea behind the whole digestive system is to break down the polymers
of macro molecules in your food into the smaller, monomers, that your cells can
use to build their own polymers, while also getting the energy they need.

And what your body needs to build at any given moment is always changing.
Maybe you need new fat stores so you can have energy to run a marathon, or new
actin and myosin to build bigger muscles or more DNA so you can replace the skin
cells you scraped off your knee when you fell, or more enzymes so you can digest
more food to get more building materials.

To meet your body's constant and constantly shifting demands, your digestive
system requires a lot of organs that perform a lot of specific tasks to break down
and absorb the right nutrient at the right time.

Now, I'm quite sure you're familiar with the key players here. They're the hollow
organs that form the continuous tube that is your alimentary canal, aka the
gastrointestinal tract, which runs from your mouth to your anus. It's worth pointing
out that these organs are hollow because you are basically hollow too.

Your digestive tract is really just one unbroken, insulated tunnel of outside that
just happens to run through your body, and it's open at both ends. You're a
doughnut.

So the layer of stratified squamous and columnar epithelial cells that line your tract
is actually a barrier between your outside world and your inside world, but it's a
barrier that allows for the selective movement of materials between them.

It's these hollow organs that do the actual moving, digesting, and absorbing of
food, and they include your mouth, pharynx, esophagus, stomach, and small and
large intestines.

In your mouth, in your esophagus, and at the other end of things, in your anus, you
have stratified squamous epithelial tissue, just like your epidermis, to help resist
the abrasive action of like, chewing, like, corn chips, maybe.

From your stomach on down though, the inner GI tract is lined with simple
columnar epithelial cells which secrete all sorts of stuff, and which absorb and
process various nutrients. Most of these columnar cells secrete mucus, which
lubricates everything and protects your cells from being digested by your own
digestive enzymes. So the inner most epithelial layer of the tube is known as the
mucosal layer and it contains some connective tissue as well, which supplies it
with blood.

Surrounding the mucosal layer is the submucosal layer made of loose areolar
connective tissue which helps provide the elasticity that the tube needs when you
eat a whole pizza in one sitting and it contains more blood vessels.

And outside that, you have the musclaris externa layer, which as you might guess,
you find the muscles responsible for moving the food through your tube. 

Beyond these layers, the GI tract gets tons of support from the accessory digestive
organ, like your teeth, and your tongue, and gall bladder, salivary glands, liver and
pancreas. They're kind of like a pit crew and mostly help by secreting various
enzymes that help take apart food as it comes down the tube.

Together, these two groups on the digestive dis-assembly line work in six steps to
destroy your food and release and recycle its nutrients.

First, of course, you've got to introduce the food to your digestive system. What
you know as eating, or ingestion, is basically just creating a bulk flow of nutrients
bol alimentar from the outside world into your tissues. This is where the work of
dis-assembly begins, in your face hole, which scientists call your mouth.

Now, we're going to get into the details of what happens here another time, but
remember that food dis-assembly is both mechanical and chemical. So, your teeth
pulverize the bite of nacho or whatever, while your salivary glands begins that
food's hours long enzyme bath. The food at this point is not nearly micro enough
to be of any use to your cells, so you have to move that mush further down your
tube.

This stage is called propulsion, and its initial mechanism is swallowing, which, as
you know, is a voluntary action, but then it's very quickly turned over to the
involuntary action of peristalsis. In peristalsis, the smooth muscles of the walls of
your digestive organs take turns contracting and relaxing to squeeze food
throughout the lumen, or cavity of your alimentary tract.
Waves of peristalsis continue through the esophagus, the stomach, and the
intestines and they're so strong that even if you were hanging upside down while
eating your lunch and drinking your tea, the food would still soldier on, fighting
gravity, and eventually make it to its final destination. Don't do that though. There
are other reasons why you shouldn't be upside down.

Anyway, all of this shipping and handling, mechanically breaks down the food
even more. And even after it goes through the stomach and its gastric acid, the
mechanical work still continues once it reaches your small intestine, as more small
muscle segments push the food back and forth to keep it crumbling up.

The goal of all this pulverization is to increase the surface area of that bite of food
by breaking it down into increasingly tiny pieces to prepare it to encounter more
enzymes in step four: Chemical Digestion.

Really, the actual process of digestion only occurs when the main action becomes
more chemical than mechanical. In here, the accessory digestive organs, namely
the liver, pancreas and gall bladder, secrete enzymes into the alimentary canal,
where they ambush the mush, and break it down into its most chemical building
blocks.

Like I said before, our cells prefer to do business in the basic currency of
monomers, like amino acids, fatty acids and simple sugars, and digestion allows
for the absorption of those nutrients as they pass from the small intestine, into the
blood, by both passive and active transport. Once those nutrients are absorbed by
your cells, you can finally use the energy inside of them, or use them to build new
tissues.

The absorption of the nutrients is the goal of the entire process. But of course, it is
not the end of it.

Once your body has sucked out all the nutrients it wants, indigestible substances,
like fiber, are escorted out of your body. Yeah, I'm talking about pooping, or
defecation.

And that is the end of the digestive line, unless you are a capybara, or one of the
other animals who make sure that they get the most out of their lunch by giving the
whole process another round and practising coprophagia, aka, eating their own
poop.

Now, you should notice here that some of the processes of digestion occur in just
one place and are the job of a single organ. Like, hopefully your only ingesting
through your mouth and eliminating from the large intestine. But, most of these six
steps require cooperation among multiple organs.

For example, both mechanical and chemical digestion start in the mouth and
continue through the stomach and the small intestines. And some chemical
breakdown continues in the large intestines, thanks to our little bacterial farm
down there. 
 Over the next couple of weeks we're going to take you and your nachos on a stroll
through your digestive system and see whose doing what, where, how, and why.
But for now, I've got some nachos to finish, so I've got to go.

And eating those nachos will provide me, as you learned today, with energy and
raw materials by first ingesting something nutritious, propelling it through my
alimentary canal where it will be mechanically broken down and chemically
digested by enzymes until my cells can absorb their monomers and use them to
make whatever they need. And eventually, there will be pooping.

In the summer of 1822, a French-Canadian fur trapper named Alexis St. Martin was going
about his business near Lake Michigan when he was shot by a hunter, right in the stomach.
The wound severe and everyone expected St. Martin to die that night, but he didn't. A local
Army doctor named William Beaumont kept him alive.

In fact, Beaumont performed so many surgeries on the injury over the next several months,
that he decided, somewhat questionably, to just keep St. Martin's stomach wound open. St.
Martin was left with a hole, or fistula, in his abdominal wall which allowed anyone to see
right into his stomach. Now, it's probably hard to work as a fur trapper with a hole in your
guts, but Beaumont saw, or possible created an opportunity. He hired St. Martin, technically
as a handyman, but really as a guinea pig.

Over the next several years and some 238 experiments, Beaumont recorded what St. Martin
ate and what his stomach did to his meals. Sometimes they just skipped the eating part all
together and just shoved some food, tied to a string, right into the guy's gut-hole. Beaumont
took samples of gastric juices and had them analyzed by chemists. Something no one had ever
done before. And he also noticed that St. Martin's digestion slowed at certain times, like when
he was sick or stressed. I mean, like beyond the stress of having a gaping hole in your
abdomen.

Through his somewhat questionable research, Beaumont discovered some major secrets of the
digestive system, like that the stomach's extremely strong acids and muscular contractions
break down food, and that some foods are more digestible or less digestible than others, and
that the brain can affect the stomach. 

Beaumont's findings, as well as his methods of clinical observation, revolutionized the field of
physiology. And St. Martin? Don't worry about him. He lived to be 83 years old, have great
health, and a hole in his guts.

Now, I sincerely hope that you can't actually see what's going on in your stomach, but let me
tell you; the story there is epic. And your digestive system's mission to disassemble food into
its tiniest, most molecular forms. The stretch that runs from your mouth to your stomach
unleashes all of the mechanical and chemical powers at its disposal. It basically roughs up
food, douses it in protein-loving, acid-triggered enzymes, reduces it all to a creamy paste, and
as a bonus, because it like you, it kills a whole hose of harmful invaders that, for whatever
reason, found their way through your face and into your tube.

But your stomach's not the end of the line for your food. Unless, it is. I mean, most of the time
everything from your mouth to your stomach prepares food to be absorbed by your tissues,
but sometimes food finds its way back up. Yeah, in case the story of Alexis St. Martin didn't
make you want to do this already, now I'm talking directly about vomiting.

Let's begin with the beginning with your mouth, aka your oral, or buccal, cavity. Now, we
don't usually think of it this way, but that is where digestion starts. The mechanical and
chemical breakdown of food through chewing and enzyme action. The inside of your mouth is
lined with a tough, thick layer of stratified, squamous epithelial that can stand up to lots of
friction, like getting scraped by tortilla chips and grilled cheese sandwiches that maybe were
cooked a little too much on the top.

Your anterior hard palate and the flexible posterior soft palate form the roof of your mouth.
The hard palate provides a hard surface for the tongue to mash food against, while the soft
palate forms a moveable fold of flesh that reflexively closes off the nasopharynx when you
swallow, so food gets directed down your esophagus and not up into your nasal cavity.

We all know what teeth are for and we have roughly have 32 of them in your basic types that
help you masticate, or chew, your food. The tongue lives on the floor of your mouth and is
basically just a big muscle that grips and constantly repositions your food as you chew. The
resulting ball of mush actually has its own special name. It's a bolus, and the tongue rolls it
back to the pharynx in preparation for swallowing.

But that's just the physical action that goes on in your mouth. Just as much destruction is
taking place through chemistry. The bolus is broken down with the help of three major pairs
of salivary glands that churn out an average of 1.5 liters of slightly acidic saliva everyday.
More than four soda cans worth of spit, per day. And all that saliva delivers enzymes like
salivary amylase, a digestive enzyme that breaks down starches into glucose monomers.

Now, once the food enters the pharynx, it's propelled by peristalsis into the esophagus, which
except for the little sphincter at the end that keeps food moving in the right direction, is really
just a glorified laundry chute lined with smooth muscle. The only time you probably even
remember you have an esophagus is when something is stuck in there or I you're feeling
intense heart burn, or if you've just puked. But, moving on.

Assuming you have not just puked, then the bolus moves onto Dr. Beaumont's ticket to fame,
the stomach. The stomach is the stretchiest part of your digestive tube, capable of holding 2-4
liters of material at any given time. Two to four liters; that is a lot of nachos--mixed with spit.
But of course it's much more than just a storage tank.

It's lined with the same four layers found though most of the G.I. tract--the mucosa,
submucosa, muscularis externa, and serosa--but it's got a few special modifications. For one
thing, the muscularis includes an additional layer of smooth muscle that gives it extra strength
FIBRE OBLICE, allowing the stomach not just to hold materials, but to actively smoosh them
around. And the inner mucosa is made up almost entirely of mucus cells, which provide a
protective coat that keep the stomach tissues from getting digested along with your lunch. 

This inner lining is dotted with millions of tiny, deep gastric pits which lead down to tubular
gastric glands. These glands, in turn, contain various types of secretory cells that brew up
some of the most potent chemicals in your body. For example, your stomach has parietal cells
that release hydrochloric acid, a substance more acidic than battery acid, which lays waste to
most of the bacteria, viruses, and other stuff that could make you sick. It also helps denature,
or change the shape, of proteins to make it easier for enzymes to digest them.

And maybe more importantly, when the hydrochloric acid is combined with pepsinogen, an
inactive enzyme that's secreted by another kind of stomach cell called chief cells, the mixture
creates the protein digesting enzyme, pepsin. Together, this super-powered acid and protein
hungry enzyme can annihilate nearly anything they encounter. 

This was apparently something that Beaumont observed first hand by dropping hunks of meat
into a cup containing St. Martin's personal gastric fluids. He watched the gobbets of food
dissolve over time, which is partly how he discovered the stomachs role in digestion was as
much chemical as mechanical. But with so much mind-blowingly powerful stuff at your
stomach's disposal, somebody down there has to be in charge.

So, your gastric glands also contain enteroendocrine cells. These cells regularly hormones like
serotonin and histamine which act locally to trigger other cells to release more acid or contract
muscle tissue. And when the time comes to tamp the action down, they secrete other
hormones like somatostatin, to inhibit secretion.

And then there are G cells which produce the most important hormone for stimulating gastric
activity, gastrin. Most signals that increase stomach activity get the job done by increasing the
secretion of gastrin, which then stimulates the secretion of other gastric fluids as well as
stomach muscle activity.

Now, if the smell of baking cookies has ever made your mouth water and your belly grumble,
then it might not surprise you to learn that these stomach secretions are ruled by neural
mechanisms, as well as hormonal ones. In fact, stomach secretion occurs in phases based on
where the food is sensed; the brain, the stomach, and the small intestine.

The cephalic phase is the one ruled by your brain and it kicks in when you first see, smell,
taste, or even think about food. That sensory input get relayed into the hypothalamus, which
stimulates the medulla oblongata, which then taps the parasympathetic fibers in the vagus
nerve. From there, the signals are then sent to the stomach with the word that "Hey, we think,
that cookies are maybe on the way, so you might want to prepare yourself."

Now this is a conditioned reflex, so it only works if you want to eat the food in question. If I
happen to be super full, or not feeling well, or somebody puts a pile of squid eyeballs in front
of me the cephalic phase isn't going to happen. And no offense if squid eyeballs are totally
your thing, they're just not my thing.

But say I eat the plate of squid eyeballs anyways, because I'm trying to be polite. Well, even
without the cephalic warm-up, when that food hits my stomach, local mechanisms both neural
and hormonal jump start the gastric phase.

For the next few hours, as my stomach grows distended from the food, it activates stretch
receptors that again stimulate my medulla and get my v nerves to tell my stomach to turn up
the juice. At the same time the secretion of gastrin is activated by other signals, like the rise in
alkalinity, caused by the stomach getting neutralized as it does its job. Conversely, as stomach
acidity increases, it increases the release of gastrin.
Now the third phase of gastric regulation, the intestinal phase, speeds or slows the rate in
which your stomach empties, so that your small intestine doesn't get too overloaded with too
much acid, or with the creamy paste that your stomach turns your food into, also know as
chyme.

Now, remember not a lot of absorption occurs in the stomach. The stomach is more like a
decontamination tank. Sure, it pummels your food down to a paste, but it's also where your
body tries to obliterate any nasties that could make you sick. As long as food is still in there,
your body has a chance to kind of size it up and feel it out, and it reserves the right eject
anything it feels is potentially dangerous.

Lots of factors can trigger the stomach's urge to purge, or vomit. But the most common are
simply ingesting too much food, eating some kind of irritant or toxin, like those produced by
bad bacteria, too much alcohol, certain drugs, or unappealing foods. Of course, if you've ever
puked in a moment of trauma or stress, you know how emotions and anxiety can also trigger
your stomach to launch its lunch.

That's the brain influencing the cephalic phase of gastric regulation again, by sending extra
fight or flight signals to the stomach. Beaumont noticed that mind-stomach connection
whenever St. Martin was affected by illness or stress. Something you'd think he'd have felt
every time that doctor came at him with some meat on a string. 

If you were able to keep down your lunch today, you learned how mechanical and chemical
digestion start in the mouth and continue in the stomach where food is pummeled by acids
and enzymes and turned into chyme. We also looked at the stomach's cephalic, gastric and
intestinal phases of digestive regulation

You know, we've been talking about a lot of serious stuff here lately.  Heart failure,
respiratory gas exchange, people with holes in their stomachs, nachos.  Some might even say
that I've been flaunting my ability to eat, digest, and enjoy a plate of chips and melted cheese.
And I wouldn't blame them if they did, because sadly nachos aren't for everyone.  

In fact, I can safely say that nachos are really only a good idea for about a third of humans.
For the rest, what may start as a party in your mouth will surely end in gastric distress.  Such
is the fate of the lactose intolerant.  

Lactose is basically milk sugar that can only be digested with the help of a special intestinal
enzyme, lactase, which many adults do not produce enough of.  In fact, way back in the day,
none of us did, until about 7500 years ago when a particularly handy genetic mutation popped
up in central Europe.  This, so called lactase persistence trait, probably spread as Neolithic
groups trekked north and west through Europe. Today nearly 90% of adult Britons and
Scandinavians can chug all the milk they want, where as down toward the Mediterranean
probably less than 40% have lactase persistence, and fewer than 10% in Africa and Asia. 

Now, technically, a lactose intolerant person can still consume dairy at their own risk, but
since their own bodies can't break down lactose, the job is left to the three pound bacteria
farm living in their large intestines.  Bacteria that try their hardest to make something of those
milk sugars; the results of which are gas, and bloating, and diarrhea.  

So it turns out, nachos aren't just a good way to talk about how the digestive system works,
they're also a good way to talk about what happens when it doesn't.

[Intro]

Remember how the stomach is great at obliterating matter, but not so hot when it comes to
actually chemically digesting stuff, or really absorbing much of anything?  You might say that
the stomach lacks subtly.  But luckily, it's got friends in low places and the small intestine is
more than happy to pick up the slack and provide a cozy environment where your food is at
long last, disassembled and absorbed by your cells.

Now, there's a lot of mechanical action and peristalsis going on here, but there's also a ton of
chemical digesting, too.  And while home brewed intestinal juices help digest the chyme your
stomach turns food into, the real power actually comes from the outside helpers-the liver, gall
bladder and pancreas.  

Now, the small intestine is called small, not because it's short, but because it's about half the
diameter of the large intestine.  The thing is actually like 6 or 7 meters long.  Not only that,
but the whole thing is lined with epithelial tissue that has more folds than an origami octopus.
These folds are lined with tiny, hair-like villi, and even tinier, microvilli, that create a truly
impressive surface area; large enough that if it were unfolded it would cover a tennis court.

It's this massive surface area and the countless capillaries just beneath it, that make the small
intestine such a champion absorber of nutrients.  It shares the same four tissue layers seen
throughout the GI tract, and it has three main subdivisions.  Straight out of the stomach and
snuggled around the pancreas, you've got the relatively short, and mostly immovable,
duodenum, which is where most of the chemical digestion occurs.  The middle section is the
jejunum. where most of the absorption takes place.  And finally, at the end, running into the
large intestine, is the ileum, where important vitamins, like A, B12, E, D and K, are absorbed.

But the duodenum is what you might call the business end of the small intestine.  It receives
chyme and gastric juices from the stomach through the pyloric sphincter, but it also imports
bile from the liver and gall bladder, enzymes from the pancreas, and it creates its own home
grown mix of enzymes.  

Some of the imported enzymes eventually pass through your system on the wave of gooey
chyme, but other enzymes are actually bound to cell membranes in the intestinal mucosal
layer, and they're reusable.  

Enzymes are proteins, and proteins are expensive, so these compounds, known as brush
border enzymes, can just sit around and process food as it passes by without your body having
to make new ones.  And the lactase that so many of us don't have is one of these.

Now, the duodenum communicates with the stomach in the last phase of gastric regulation,
which we talked about in the last episode,  the intestinal phase.  This is where the duodenum
lets the stomach know with hormones and nerves signals when, and how much, chyme to
release so it doesn't get overwhelmed all at once.  It's also where stuff, like bicarbonate from
the pancreas, gets dumped to help neutralize the stomach acid so it doesn't burn a hole in your
guts.

And this brings me to your crucial accessory organs, the things apart from the alimentary
canal that never come into contact with ingested material, but still play an essential role in
digestion.  And first up, the liver.

The liver is a massive, fatty, four-lobed, and very important organ and lives directly under
your diaphragm.  And fun fact--it can fully regenerate itself after an injury or surgery with as
little as 25% of its original tissue.  The liver serves tons of critical metabolic and regulatory
roles that we don't have time to get in to right now, but its main role in the digestive system is
to make bile.  

Bile is the missing ingredient your body needs to attack fatty foods, which is a tricky
business.  In part, that's because fat isn't water soluble, and since your insides are mostly
water, fats will clump together becoming hard to digest.  To keep fat from clumping, you need
an emulsifier.  So bile comes in to keep big hydrophobic fat molecules from sticking together,
which allows lipid hungry enzymes to move in break them down into fatty acids and
monoglycerides that you can then digest and absorb.

While your liver creates the bile, it gets stored and concentrated in the neighboring
gallbladder, a thin, green sac cozied up to the liver.  It gets the signal when chyme slides into
the duodenum, which activates the enteroendocrine cells to release a pair of hormones.  Those
hormones in turn tell the gall bladder to contract and squirt bile through the cystic and bile
ducts into the duodenum.  

Another crucial accessory organ is the pancreas, a gland that looks like a fist full of cottage
cheese stuffed in a plastic bag.  The pancreas also does lots of important things for your body,
especially related to your endocrine system.  But for our purposes today, just know that it
brews up a powerful enzyme cocktail that is also triggered by those same two hormones.  

The pancreatic juice is kind of like the Neapolitan ice cream of bodily secretions.  It's like
everybody's favorite ingredients all put together, and when you mix them, the result is
especially powerful.  You've got trypsin and peptidase, which break proteins down into amino
acids, and you have lipases that turn triglycerides into fatty acids and glycerol.  Amylase,
meanwhile, reduces carbs to fructose and sucrose, and nuclease busts the nucleic acids that
are in DNA and RNA into nucleotides. 
Once all those macro-molecules have been disassembled into their monomers, the small
intestine's epithelial cells can finally absorb and transport them through your capillaries and
into the blood stream, where they can travel, pretty much, to any cell in your body, and be
used to build collagen or store fat, or replace dying cells.  The final and true purpose behind
all of that eating that you do.  

So, once the chyme has worked through your small intestine, it passes through the ileocecal
valve and then hits the cecum, the first part of the large intestine where, congratulations, your
food is now officially feces.

The large intestine, consisting of the colon, rectum and anus, is relatively short, at about 1.5
meters.  And it provides a nice little frame for the small intestine here at the end of the
alimentary canal.  

And now your body has sucked up almost all of the nutrients it can, and it's basically just
pushing indigestible goo around so the large intestine doesn't have a lot of hard work to do.
Its main functions are to absorb any remaining water, so you don't have constant diarrhea, and
to store the rest until it's ready to exit the body.  

It also plays host to hundreds of species and trillions of individual gut bacteria which digest
what ever chyme your body couldn't, releasing essential B and K vitamins, and some short
fatty acids, which the large intestine still can absorb.  In doing so, they also produce gases,
like carbon dioxide and methane and sulfurous compounds called mercaptans and hydrogen
sulfide, which eventually, pass.

Ok, I know what you're thinking now.  You're like, "Hank, what's up with the nachos?
Surely, you're not just going to bring up nachos at the beginning of the episode without
explaining how they can turn on you."  Well, I've never disappointed you before, have I?

Those of us who can't produce the enzyme lactase in our small intestine, simply let milk and
cheese pass through the organ untouched, leaving the digestion to those bacteria in the large
intestine.  And those bacteria possess about 1000 different kinds of enzymes of their own,
including lactase.  But their digestion process produces a whole lot of extra gas, which is why
nachos may leave me feeling cheesy and satisfied, but leave you bloated and crampy and
malodorous.  But enough farting around, let's wrap up this fantastic journey.

Fecal matter keeps moving through in a couple of different ways. Slow moving haustral
contractions keep mixing it and chopping it in the large intestine, occurring about every 30
minutes or so, and lasting about a minute.  Most people also experience a few mass peristalsis
movements a day; big, intense contractions that clear out a large swath of intestine at once,
pushing the feces into the rectum.  These often occur just after eating.  

Once in the rectum, your poop stimulates receptors that tap the parasympathetic defecation
reflex, which signals the colon and rectum to contract and the internal anal sphincter to relax.
This forces the poop into the anal canal, sending more messages to the brain that allow us to
decide to voluntarily open the external anal sphincter, or just hold it for a minute while we
find a bathroom.  

And when that moment arrives, what was once food says farewell to the alimentary canal that
temporarily held it, and passes back into the light of day.  And that, my friends, is the end of
your digestive system.  Pretty cool, right?  

And so it's all over. But that doesn't mean you should forget about what we learned today,
which is that the small intestine performs most of your chemical digestion in the duodenum,
while accessory organs, including the liver, gallbladder, and pancreas, contribute enzymes
that all but finish the job.  Then the large intestine, which is actually shorter than the small
intestine, tries to extract the last big of nutrition, including the occasional attempt to turn
nachos into energy, which for most humans, ends in gassy failure.