How does poop travel

A bowel movement is the last stop in the movement of food through your digestive tract. Your stool passes out of your body through the rectum and anus. Another name for stool is feces. It is made of what is left after your digestive system stomach, small intestine, and colon absorbs nutrients and fluids from what you eat and drink.

Sometimes a bowel movement isn't normal. Diarrhea happens when stool passes through the large intestine too quickly. Constipation occurs when stool passes through the large intestine too slowly. Your blood carries simple sugars, amino acids, glycerol, and some vitamins and salts to the liver. Your liver stores, processes, and delivers nutrients to the rest of your body when needed.

The lymph system , a network of vessels that carry white blood cells and a fluid called lymph throughout your body to fight infection, absorbs fatty acids and vitamins.

Your body uses sugars, amino acids, fatty acids, and glycerol to build substances you need for energy, growth, and cell repair. Your hormones and nerves work together to help control the digestive process. Signals flow within your GI tract and back and forth from your GI tract to your brain. Cells lining your stomach and small intestine make and release hormones that control how your digestive system works.

These hormones tell your body when to make digestive juices and send signals to your brain that you are hungry or full. Your pancreas also makes hormones that are important to digestion. You have nerves that connect your central nervous system—your brain and spinal cord—to your digestive system and control some digestive functions.

For example, when you see or smell food, your brain sends a signal that causes your salivary glands to "make your mouth water" to prepare you to eat.

When food stretches the walls of your GI tract, the nerves of your ENS release many different substances that speed up or delay the movement of food and the production of digestive juices. The nerves send signals to control the actions of your gut muscles to contract and relax to push food through your intestines. Griffin P. Rodgers explaining the importance of participating in clinical trials. Clinical trials that are currently open and are recruiting can be viewed at www.

The NIDDK translates and disseminates research findings to increase knowledge and understanding about health and disease among patients, health professionals, and the public. Why is digestion important?

How does my digestive system work? How does food move through my GI tract? How does my digestive system break food into small parts my body can use? What happens to the digested food? How does my body control the digestive process? Clinical Trials What is the digestive system? The digestive system Bacteria in your GI tract, also called gut flora or microbiome, help with digestion.

Proteins break into amino acids Fats break into fatty acids and glycerol Carbohydrates break into simple sugars MyPlate offers ideas and tips to help you meet your individual health needs. Your digestive system breaks nutrients into parts that are small enough for your body to absorb. The digestive process starts when you put food in your mouth. As food moves through your GI tract, your digestive organs break the food into smaller parts using: motion, such as chewing, squeezing, and mixing digestive juices, such as stomach acid, bile , and enzymes Mouth.

Hormones Cells lining your stomach and small intestine make and release hormones that control how your digestive system works.

Nerves You have nerves that connect your central nervous system—your brain and spinal cord—to your digestive system and control some digestive functions. What are clinical trials, and are they right for you? Upper muscle in stomach relaxes to let food enter, and lower muscle mixes food with digestive juice. If you've ever drunk something too fast, started to cough, and heard someone say that your drink "went down the wrong way," the person meant that it went down your windpipe by mistake.

This happens when the epiglottis doesn't have enough time to flop down, and you cough involuntarily without thinking about it to clear your windpipe. Once food has entered the esophagus, it doesn't just drop right into your stomach.

Instead, muscles in the walls of the esophagus move in a wavy way to slowly squeeze the food through the esophagus. This takes about 2 or 3 seconds. Your stomach, which is attached to the end of the esophagus, is a stretchy sack shaped like the letter J.

It has three important jobs:. The stomach is like a mixer, churning and mashing together all the small balls of food that came down the esophagus into smaller and smaller pieces.

It does this with help from the strong muscles in the walls of the stomach and gastric say: GAS-trik juices that also come from the stomach's walls. In addition to breaking down food, gastric juices also help kill bacteria that might be in the eaten food. If you stretched out an adult's small intestine, it would be about 22 feet long 6. The small intestine breaks down the food mixture even more so your body can absorb all the vitamins, minerals, proteins, carbohydrates , and fats.

The grilled chicken on your pizza is full of proteins — and a little fat — and the small intestine can help extract them with a little help from three friends: the pancreas say: PAN-kree-uss , liver, and gallbladder. Those organs send different juices to the first part of the small intestine. These juices help to digest food and allow the body to absorb nutrients.

The pancreas makes juices that help the body digest fats and protein. A juice from the liver called bile helps to absorb fats into the bloodstream.

And the gallbladder serves as a warehouse for bile, storing it until the body needs it. Your food may spend as long as 4 hours in the small intestine and will become a very thin, watery mixture. It's time well spent because, at the end of the journey, the nutrients from your pizza, orange, and milk can pass from the intestine into the blood. Once in the blood, your body is closer to benefiting from the complex carbohydrates in the pizza crust, the vitamin C in your orange, the protein in the chicken, and the calcium in your milk.

Next stop for these nutrients: the liver! And the leftover waste — parts of the food that your body can't use — goes on to the large intestine. The nutrient-rich blood comes directly to the liver for processing.