An Overview of Your Digestive System

The human body is such a beautiful masterpiece of precision and complexity. I love learning more about the intricacy of how it functions, and specifically how our food and our gut contribute to its overall well-being. Just thinking about every single chemical reaction happening each second is too much for the greatest mind in the world to truly comprehend.

Even at a glance, we have neurons sending and receiving information in our brain to keep our body functioning, our blood is constantly regenerating itself, and being pumped throughout our body through 100,000 km of veins and arteries, our heart continues to create energy and movement to keep the blood moving. Lungs exchanging oxygen for carbon dioxide as we move, breathing in and out. Our hormones signaling the cascade of actions and reactions they control, and our digestive system creating fluids to break down food, moving food through our intestines and extracting nutrients to be transported throughout the body. It truly is a beautifully complex design intended to work in harmony with itself.

So what do we do when things start functioning incorrectly? For me, it comes down to our diet and how well our digestive system is nourishing the body. I am a nutritionist, so that is what I focus on, but as I’ve explained to everyone I talk to about health, if we don’t have the right building blocks, we cannot build a healthy body. I was taught to think of the body on a cellular level, since a group of healthy cells will produce healthy tissue, and healthy tissue produce healthy organs and healthy organs will produce healthy organ system, and healthy organ systems gives you a healthy body. This makes such perfect sense to me. Probably one of the many reasons I was drawn to nutrition.

When we do our best to eat healthy food (see my definition here), and the body is still not functioning at its best, where do you start? The gut/digestive tract is often a jumping off point for me. It is entirely possible to be eating a well-rounded healthy diet, but still not be able to nourish our bodies. There are a few main parts of digestion where things can go terribly wrong.

First, there is something super easy to fix, chewing. You may think it simple, but the mechanical breakdown of food in your mouth sets up the lower part of digestion for success.

Next up, stomach acid. I could write pages on stomach acid and its importance along with common misunderstandings, but I’ll cut to the important things. Your stomach is the only place in the body you want to be acidic. This helps to untangle proteins, helps liberate vitamins and minerals bound to other compounds and further break down food and prepares it to be ‘snipped’ into pieces for the body to absorb and use as building materials.

After your stomach, you have your one two punch from your pancreas and liver. These lovely organs produce enzymes to snip/cut broken down food particles into small enough pieces so the body can absorb and use them. The pancreas also gives the acidic mixture coming out of the stomach a neutralizing agent to change the acidic liquid to a more alkaline liquid.

Last in line, but definitely not least is your small and large intestine. This long snaking tube is where the body takes in all it needs from the food you ate. We also have a few trillion microbes and bacteria that live in our intestines, which also help to use our food as fuel and break things down properly before entering our blood stream. If we end up with an incorrect balance of bacteria here, it can cause us pain and reduce our ability to draw healthy nutrients from our food.

In a nutshell, these are the major parts of your digestive system and their major functions. Since they each work best after the last did its work, you can see how one break in the chain can cause problems.

Stay tuned, next week I will touch base on the effects we see when things are not functioning properly in our digestive system.