Even before you take your first bite of food, your stomach is getting ready to digest your food, and will be digesting it for the next couple of hours or days, depending on what you ate.
When you first smell a food, or maybe even think about it, your mouth produces saliva, which helps to break down chemicals in the food. When you are done chewing, your tongue pushes the food down into the opening of your esophagus, which is the second part of the digestive system process.
The epiglottis is the small piece of tissue that helps the food go into your esophagus instead of somewhere else.
The esophagus is about ten inches long, and moves your food from the back of the throat to your stomach. Once the food has entered your esophagus, the muscles in the walls of the esophagus move in wavelike contractions - called peristalsis - to move the food through the esophagus, and into the stomach. All of this takes less than three seconds.
Your stomach is attached to the end of the esophagus, and has three jobs: store the food that has been eaten, break down the food into a liquid, and slowly empty the liquid into the small intestine. The muscles of the stomach mix all the food together with gastric juices, which help to kill any bacteria that might have been in the food. This thick liquid/paste is called chyme.
The small intestine, which is actually the most important step of digestion, is about one to two inches around, and is right below the stomach. If you stretched out an adult's intestine, it would be over twenty-two feet long. The small intestine serves to break down food even further, so that your body can absorb all the proteins, carbs, fats, etc. that it needs. The pancreas, gallbladder, and liver also help in this. The pancreas produces juices that help to digest fats and proteins. Bile from the liver absorbs fats into the bloodstream, and the gallbladder stores the bile, until it is needed by the liver.
All the nutrients then travel to the liver, while everything else that has not been digested goes to the large intestine.
Next is the large intestine (also known as the large bowel), which is made up of three parts (colon, rectum, cecus). It is about three to four inches around, and five feet long (if it was stretched out). This is where all the food that cannot be digested goes. Since it cannot be digested, it must leave the body; but before it goes, it passes through a part of the large intestine called the colon, which is where the body gets its last chance to absorb some of the nutrients from it that are left. Once it is done, it becomes a solid, and exits the body. In total, it takes about thirty-six to forty-eight hours or even longer for all the waste material to pass through the large intestine, and the wastes in the large intestine are also pushed through by the wavelike motion of peristalsis, as well as in the small intestine and esophagus.
The large intestine pushes the feces into the rectum, which is the last step in the digestive system process. This stays here until you are ready to use the bathroom. When your use the bathroom, the feces exit your body through the anus.
Food
taking food and distrubute vitamines through out your body
to break down food
the function of organs in the digestive system is to break down food
the function of organs in the digestive system is to break down food
The first task of the digestive system is to break down food into a fine pulp (mechanical digestion). When the food is physically broken down, digestive chemicals break the food down into small molecules (chemical digestion). The mouth is the organ in which the process of digestion begins.(Google)
To break down food into nutrients.
cells
There is only one organ system that breaks down food. That is the digestive system. However the digestive system uses two processes to break the food down. They are physically and chemically.
Where food enters the digestive system. Starts to break down into smaller parts Where food enters the digestive system. Starts to break down into smaller parts
Even though there are many systems in the body the only system that is used to break down food is the digestive system. The stomach and the intestines work together to help break down food as well.
A squirrel's digestive system works in a similar fashion to the humans. Squirrels eat food and as the food sits in their stomach their brain releases digestive enzymes to break down that food.