Your Complex Body Factory

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Questions, questions, the mind has so many questions.  Why should a person not eat sugar and fat all day long?  They taste good and provide a body with energy so what is the big deal about the types of food a person eats?  Do you ever wonder how the food you eat creates energy for your body to run on?  Do you care why it is important for a person to eat healthy foods? 

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If you put the wrong type of fuel in a car, it may spit, sputter, and not run very smoothly or worse yet it may not work at all.  Not all food is created equally, therefore, it is important for a person to know what the food they eat does and does not do for their body.  How about taking a tour through your body to find out what happens to the sources of energy we call carbohydrates, fat, and protein. 

Of course, sweet, salty, and fatty foods taste good and that is because the taste buds in the mouth like them.  The mouth is the very first part of your body’s digestive system that begins to crush food into bits with the teeth and tongue that can be swallowed to prevent choking (Kong & Singh, 2008; Sizer & Whitney, 2014).  However, the mouth has other important jobs like producing saliva to eliminate rough edges on food that could harm the esophagus and to help the food continue through the digestive tract.  The body cannot use that food you have eaten until the energy and nutrients are broken down into something useful to the body’s cells and tissues. 

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The esophagus’s tubular makeup is filled with peristalsis muscles that mash and squeeze the food into what experts call chyme, which is just a technical term for broken down food mixed with saliva (The Digestive Video, 2012).  The next rest stop for the chyme is the multi-compartmental stomach that holds, forces, and eventually injects the chyme into the small intestine.  That long tubular small intestine is where cells exchange nutrients between its walls and the rest of the body before entering the colon or large intestine (Sizer & Whitney, 2014; Kong & Singh, 2008).  After the colon is done with the food mass it secretes the leftover waste into the rectum and out through the anus (The Digestive Video, 2012).    

So now that you know the path your food travels, how do the energy and nutrients become useful to the body?  Think of it this way.  The digestive factory has numerous storage units full of useful stuff, but until the expert scientist shows up it is just stuff.  Herein lies the importance of the pancreas, gall bladder, and small intestine as co-laborers preparing the chyme mixture to be useful and absorbed by injecting bile and juices into it, whereby enzymes break the chyme down even further into pieces for the intestinal system to absorb them (Kong & Singh, 2008; Sizer & Whitney, 2014).  

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The more natural a food is the easier it is for the body to process and become absorbed as energy.  Take for example a banana or sunflower seeds.  The mouth with its saliva enzymes break open the seeds for digestion to release the nutrients and the banana’s starchy makeup gets broken down into sugars the body can absorb when it reaches the stomach and small intestine.  In the stomach, the protein in the sunflower seeds is unwound, clipped, and the chyme travels into the small intestine to be absorbed.  The small villi in the intestinal walls move nutrients back and forth through to the rest of the body’s cellular tissues and bloodstream (Sizer & Whitney, 2014).  From there the lymph system transports fat and fat-soluble vitamins to blood vessels close to the heart.  If there is too much fat or the highly saturated fat and it builds up near the heart, it can cause cardiovascular disease restricting blood flow and forcing the heart to work harder.  This is why food items that are carbohydrates and proteins are better and easier to be digested and utilize the nutrients. 

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Every body wants the best source of energy it can get.  Do you give your body the best for it or do you eat what makes you happiest?  Think about this next time you take a bite of that food you are going to have for breakfast.  Give your body wholesome, lean, ready to be used food so that you will have an abundance of energy for your body factory to run efficiently. 

References

Kong, F., & Singh, R. P. (2008). Disintegration of solid foods in human stomach. Journal of Food Science, 73(5), R67-R80. doi:10.1111/j.1750-3841.2008.00766.x

Sizer, F. & Whitney, E. (2014). Nutrition: Concepts and controversies (13th ed.). Mason, OH: Cengage Learning.

The Digestive System. (2012). YouTube. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7xKYNz9AS0&feature=related