Body plumbing (a short reminder of how your body processes food).
If you wanna stay alive, you gotta do a couple things, like breathe oxygen and eat food. This is about the latter. Thank goodness we don’t have transparent skin, although it could be interesting to candidly see how those internal organs work in action…
A very very short short intro to the human Digestive Process
Intro / entropy in general
We eat food. Why?
Because it tastes good. Also, it’s our body saying it needs vitamins and minerals and energy.
Why do we need energy?
Because the natural state of things leans towards entropy. We’re going to make that our word for today. Entropy.
Word of the day : Entropy
Entropy measures disorder. It’s how energy is distributed. Remember, energy cannot be created or destroyed. It can only be transferred, or we also might say it can be redistributed. Entropy refers to how something moves towards disorder or chaos.
My layperson’s understanding is that entropy is often used to describe, in general terms, how matter decays or falls apart. In other words, the natural order of most things - or anything? - tends toward entropy, or falling apart. Something left alone, untended, will be re-distributed in some form, and the thing, whatever it is, will become something else other than what it is.
So let’s say you have a house. You live in the house, and you get tired of fixing things up. So you stop doing anything on it. You just let mold and rust and dirt and the elements take over. The parts that make up the house are being redistributed into something else; at some point it will fall down, fall apart, and be something different than a house.
How does entropy relate to our bodies?
Entropy and our bodies
I am a non-scientist, according to my degrees, my experience, my research, and my level of understanding about a lot of things. But a lack of scientific qualifications and medical expertise hasn’t stopped any number of people these days from authoritatively commenting on any number of science- and health-related issues, such as vaccines, pandemics, and immunology. So I’m going to non-authoritatively run with my grasp of how entropy relates to our bodies.
I am currently 44, and unlike Ben Button, I am not getting younger. Aging, to my understanding, is a binary process, so since I’m not getting younger, I’m getting older. Parts and systems of my body are in the process of not working as well as they once did, and I’m not superhappy about that, although I’m not unhappy about aging itself.
To put it bluntly, my body is falling apart. Very slowly. I hope the rate of falling apart continues to be slow. But my muscles and tissues and bones and mind are not as nimble and resilient was they once were. They are slowly moving toward a state of redistribution, and I wish I could just will parts of my strength and intelligence and other characteristics to people I wanted, instead of just having them…weaken. But Science hasn’t figured that out yet. Idiots.
(Sorry. You’re not the idiots. I’m just disgruntled.)
How can I keep my body from rapidly falling apart?
Food
Well, one thing is to feed it. Feed it, literally, the vitamins and minerals and energy it needs to survive and stay strong. Or, you know, not waste away as quickly. I’d like to keep my bones as strong as I can, and my hair as pretty as can be, and my muscles firm as possible. For as long as possible.
So I eat food. Good food, and sometimes…not so good food.
Mouth
I love easy questions. Like this one. Imagine your life is on the line and you have ten seconds to answer the question “where does the digestive system start?” And if you answer incorrectly, you get thrown into a giant pit with dozens of angry little frogs. Terrifying, I know.
But because you’re reading this right now, you know, you know that the digestive system starts in…
your mouth.
Nice work. So the food goes in, you chew it up so it’s in smaller pieces, and saliva gets all mixed in and helps turn those smaller pieces into a more liquid-like substance.
Remember:
The fancy word for chewing is mastication
That messy mass of chewed up food that gets mixed in with saliva is called the bolus
Esophagus
There are two tubes going down from your mouth. Every bolus of banana going down has two choices over which route to take. One’s right and one’s wrong.
The right one is the esophagus. This goes straight from mouth to stomach and carries food.
The wrong one is the windpipe, or in simpler terms, the trachea. This goes straight from mouth to lungs and carries oxygen. The trachea is also a good part of your body to keep functioning, as many medical experts advise oxygen for the lungs on a frequent basis. Sometimes a morsel of food makes a wrong turn and ends up in your trachea, and then you start coughing and can’t breathe and ideally some stranger (or loved one) will jump in and perform a 1970s procedure named after an American thoracic surgeon that often shows up melodramatically in movies whereupon someone violently and abruptly grizzly-bear hugs the choker from behind, ideally not breaking any sternums or causing sudden bowel leakage.
So it’s important, as much as possible, to make sure your tongue and throat muscles direct your food down the right pipe. That would be the esophagus.
Stomach
So the esophagus, with the help of gravity and its own peculiar squeezing abilities, guides the food down to the stomach. Again, this is a process that I feel largely uninterested in watching as I’m eating. The eventually ends up in the cavern known as the stomach.
Incidentally, your stomach is shaped a little like the letter “J” as it hangs off the esophagus.
The stomach stretches. Sometimes more than it should, depending on how much food you’re eating. Stomachs are extra awesome because they secrete acid from their lining and help break down the food even more.
(This particular acid is called gastric juice, which is another unfortunate name, IMO)
The stomach and its juices work their magic on your food for a while.* The muscles roll it around and squish it up and all the while, the gastric acids are doing their thing, breaking down the parts the body can use, murdering bad bacteria, et cetera, and pretty soon, that food is all pulpy and not so-recognizable as food anymore.
*2-4 hours, generally
Intestines, the small
Probably the most important fact about the small intestine is that it’s about 22 feet long. Try to remember that. It could be helpful in an emergency someday.
The mushiest of the food continues its life narrative to the small intestines, which contain strategically placed blood vessels all throughout. Amazing. The little bits of food that have gotten mushed down get carried throughout your body via these vessels, and their story continues as they travel to the parts where they are most needed. That’s your body digesting, or harvesting the food. I just made up the phrase “harvesting” as a synonym for “digesting.” I don’t know if it stands scientific scrutiny, but I wanted to try it out.
If you eat well, those particles of food - vitamins, minerals, carbohydrates, fats, proteins - will nourish and embolden the parts of the body it reaches to stay strong and fight the great fight another day.
If you don’t eat well, those particles of food will…well, try to eat mostly good food. But the nature of “good food” is for another blog post.
Also, the liver and pancreas are buddies with the small intestines and work in tandem to:
a) provide bile (another juice) to break up fatty food (liver)
b) process digested food before it makes the body’s rounds (liver)
c) kick in enzymes to digest proteins and fats (pancreas)
Intestines, the large
Everything else has done its job, the food’s all digested, and there’s nothing left. Oh wait. There is. There is still stuff left. Your body decided it couldn’t use everything that you ate, so it needs to get rid of it. It does so by sending to the large intestine.
The large intestine is sort of like the waiting room of the body. Unwanted food particles hang out there until you decide to get rid of them.
It also has what seems to me one of the least helpful body parts: the appendix. Sometimes people have to get it taken out because it gets infected. I’m not quite sure what it does, except sometimes cause people excruciating pain by its very existence.
So pretty much everything that makes it to the large intestine is the unwanted stuff. If we were doing a movie where we were using personification to build a story around inanimate objects, then this part would be super sad because all the unwanted, unloved, unproductive characters would end up here. In the large intestine. Because they weren’t useful or wanted anywhere else in the body.
All waiting rooms close at some point, and eventually, that unwanted old food has to go somewhere else. So it says goodbye and heads to the colon, where the body checks one final time to see if there’s any useful water or minerals it can absorb into the bloodstream.
Whatever is left keeps moving. As it keeps moving, it gets harder and harder (usually). This is what we call, scientifically, poop. The cool thing about poop is that it’s a good word if you’re practicing how to spell words backwards, which is a skill that might come in handy at some point.
The large intestine shoves the poop to the rectum, which is end of the line. Well, almost. It stays there until you find a good place to say goodbye, at which point it’s gently pushed through the anus, and ideally, into a porcelain container that can be flushed.
Super good things to do to help out your digestive system
Drink water. A lot.
Eat high-fiber foods like vegetables and fruits and whole grains.
Repeat
If we actually thought about this complete process every time we were eating, it might help us to think a little more mindfully about the foods we’re putting in our bodies.
Also, it might take away a little from the joy of eating. But it is important to have an idea of what’s going on inside that beautiful body of yours. And mine. And all of ours.
Amazing how we’re so much alike in so many unseen ways.
Farewell
Eat well!
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