Kavitha Komatineni

Science

January 29th, 2008

How it works

The digestive system works with your mouth, esophagous, stomach, and your small intestine. The digestive system starts out with your mouth. Your mouth is part of your digestive system because your teeth and the chemical in your saliva breaks down your food. Next is your esophagous. Your esophagous has smooth muscles in the wall and the muscles contract and move the food toward your stomach. Then its your stomach. Your stomach has smooth muscles in it. Those muscles help mash the food, Your muscles mix the food with a liquid from your stomach. They do that until your food is thick liquid. Now it is your small intestine. Most digestion in your body takes place during 3 to 6 hours that food stays in our small intestine. The large intestine removes much of the liquid and stores the solid waste until it leaves the body.

What you need in the digestive system are your mouth, your esophagous, your stomach and your small intestine and your large intestines. If you didn't have your mouth then you couldn't bite your food or chew your food. that means you wouldn't be able to eat and that means you would starve to death. Without your esophagus the food from your mouth couldn't go to your stomach. Without your stomach the your food wouldn't be mashed up all the way and it wouldn't go to your intestine. Without your small and large intestine then your intestine wouldn't be able to hold food for 3 to 6 hours in it. It also wouldn't be able to break food into nutrients. The large intestine wouldn't be ablet o hold the food that can be digested. It wouldn't be able to remove much of the liquid and store the solid waste until it leaves the body.

You keep the digestive system healthy by chewing the food well in your mouth, eating healthy food, keeping your teeth clean. If you chew the food really good then your food can get through the system easier. If you eat healthy food then your stomach will have an easier time mashing the food. If you also keep your teeth clean then they don't fall out and its easier to chew.

Some diseases that could happen in the digestive system could be a stomach virus and a stomach ache. A stomach virus starts if you touch something that someone with a virus touched then you touched your mouth it will go into your digestive system and you will get it. A stomach ache starts by you having worms in your stomach and those worms don't let you digest so your food in your stomach becomes a clump.

Interesting facts

We eat about 500 kilograms of food per year. That is roughly equal to the weight of 10 people a year. And adult esophagous ranges from 10 inches to 14 inches. The stomach wall is full of three layers of powerful muscles. A full grown horses intestines are 89 feet long. That is roughly 15 fully grown people in length or a one very tall tree.