Do you know about our digestive system? 🥦

00:00:00
Speaker 1: You're listening to sleep Tight Science. Did you know that the average person produces about two pounds of gas per day from the digestive process. What This gas is mainly made up of nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, and methane. It is released through farting or belching. That's a lot of gas. Hello, friends, and welcome back to sleep Tight Science, a bedtime show that answers your questions about science. Do you know what happens inside your body after you take a bite of food. After you take a bite of food, a complex series of events occur inside your body to break down the food and extract or take out nutrients. Nutrients are what your body needs to grow and be healthy. This complex series of events or process is called digestion, and it takes place within the digestive system. The digestive system is a really important part of your body. In this episode, we will learn about our digestive system and try to answer some of the questions you our listeners have submitted about this topic. Before we answer some of the questions, let's learn some basic facts first, the digestive system. The digestive system starts with your mouth. When you eat, your teeth break the food into smaller pieces, and your tongue helps move the food around in your mouth. Your saliva also mixes with the food to make it easier to swallow. Next, the food travels down a long tube called the esophagus and into your stomach. Your stomach is like a big bag that can hold lots of food. Inside your stomach, the food is mixed with stomach acid and enzymes, which are special chemicals in your body that help break down the food even more. After your stomach has done its job, the food moves into your small intestine. The small intestine is a long, skinny tube folded up inside your belly. This is where most of the nutrients from your food are absorbed into your body. The walls of the small intestine have tiny finger like projections called villi that help absorb the nutrients. Finally, what's left of your food moves into your large intestine. The large intestine is wider and shorter than the small intestine, and it's where your body gets rid of waste. Waste is, of course, a more formal way of saying poop. Water is absorbed from the waste that is in the large intestine, which makes the waste more more solid. Then the waste moves out of your body through your rectum and anus when you go to the bathroom. The digestive system is made up of many parts that work together to turn the food you eat into nutrients your body can use, and then get rid of the waste your body can't use. Remember, it is important to eat a healthy and balanced diet to keep your digestive system working properly. We will look at the digestive process again in more detail, but first let's answer a few other questions listeners have sent in Nolan asks why don't animals have to wear clothes? Animals do not need to wear clothes because fur, feathers, scales, and other physical adaptations protect them from the elements and regulate or adjust their body temperature. So your pet dog or cat, for example, has fur that insulates them and keeps them warm in colder temperatures, while birds have feathers that help them adjust their body temperature and keep them dry in the rain. Bears have lots of fur to keep them warm too. What do other animals do to stay warm? We humans have relatively little body hair and are not well adapted to very cold or hot temperatures, so we must wear clothes to protect ourselves from the elements. Want to go outside in winter without a warm coat. Of course, we wear clothes for other purposes, and going to school or work without clothes on is not culturally or socially acceptable where we live. But clothes also protect us from sunburn, insect bites, and sharp objects. So animals have evolved or acquired various physical adaptations that allow them to survive and thrive in their natural environments without the need for clothing, while we have developed clothing as a cultural and practical adaptation to help us survive and thrive in a wide range of environments. June asks how many pieces of hair do you have on your head? This would be a tricky question because it could be a large number. We learned that the number of hairs on a person's head can vary greatly depending on age, gender, genetics, and health. But on average, we read that a person with a full head of hair can have anywhere from one hundred thousand to one hundred and fifty thousand individual hairs. That's a lot of hair. The number of hairs on a person's head is not constant and can change over time. Some people, as they get older might have very little hair at all. So, while it's difficult to give a precise number at any given time, counting all your hair is a pretty huge task, it's safe to say that most people have tens of thousands of individual hairs on their heads. Lincoln, Scarlet and Levi ask why do you get dizzy when you spin around too much? When you spin around, your body gets a little confused. You have tiny hairs and special fluid filled canals inside your ears that help you keep your balance and know which way is up. When you spin around, the fluid in these canals begins to move in a circular pattern, causing the cilia, those tiny like hair structures inside your inner ear, to bend and send signals to your brain that you are moving or spinning. But when you stop spinning, the fluid in your ears keeps moving for a little while, even though you are not spinning anymore. This creates a mismatch between the signals sent to your brain by the ccilia in your inner ear and the signals sent by your eyes and other sensory organs, which can cause dizzyness and disorientation. That's why you might feel like the room is still spinning even after you stop. Luckily, the dizziness usually goes away pretty quickly. Thank you Nolan, June, Lincoln, Scarlet and Levi for your questions. What are the twelve major systems in the human body? The digestive system is a crucial component of the human body. It works closely with the other eleven major systems to maintain overall health and well being. Each system carries out one or more processes necessary for life. For example, the circulatory system, the heart, blood, vessels, and blood delivers food and oxygen to all body cells and removes their waste products. But what are these other systems? Let us first quickly introduce these other systems before we look at the digestive system in more detail. A twelve major systems in the human body. These systems include the following. The integumentary system. That's a big word that means your skin, hair, nails, and sweat glands. The skeletal system. Individual bones comprise the skeletal system supporting your body. The muscular system. Muscles make up the muscular system, which allows the body to move. The nervous system. The brain and the nerves form the nervous system. This controls most functions of the body. The endocrine system, which includes the pituitary gland, thyroid gland, pancreas, adrenal glands, and gonets, and controls various body processes. The cardiovascular or circulatory system delivers essential chemicals to all the body cells. It includes the hearts and blood vessels. The lymphatic system helps the body to fight infection. The respiratory system includes the nose, pharynx, larynx, trachea, bronchi, and lungs. You are using this system when you breathe. The urinary system is the group of organs that help eliminate waste products and extra water our bodies don't need. The reproductive system includes the organs that help us have babies. The immune system helps protect us from harmful germs such as viruses, bacteria, and fungi. It is made up of a network of cells, tissues, and organs that work together to keep us healthy. Last, but not least, we have the digestive system, which includes the mouth, pharynx, esophagus, stomach, small intestine, large intestine, rectum, and anus. Let's take a closer look at how our digestive system works. How does our digestive system work? And how do we digest food? These two questions are related, but refer to different concepts. How we digest food is all about digestion, which refers to the process of breaking down food into smaller molecules that our body can use for energy, growth, and repair. Digestion starts in the mouth, where we chew and grind food into smaller pieces, and continues in the stomach and small intestine, where enzymes and acids break down the food into nutrients. The digestive system refers to the organs and structures in our body involved in digestion. This includes the mouth, salivary glands, pharynx or throat, esophagus, stomach, small intestine, large intestine, rectum, and a, as well as accessory organs such as the liver, pancreas, and gall bladder. The digestive system breaks down food, absorbs nutrients, and eliminates waste. In other words, digestion is the process of breaking down food, while the digestive system is the group of organs and structures that work together to carry out this process. The nutrients essential for life are locked inside the large molecules that make up food. The digestive system's job is to break down these large molecules, such as carbohydrates, proteins, and fats, to release simple nutrients like sugars, amino acids, and fatty acids. The digestive process has four stages, ingestion, digestion, absorption, and ingestion. Ingestion starts in the mouth, where we chew and grind our food into smaller pieces. This is called mechanical digestion. While chewing, our salivary glands release saliva that contains enzymes that start breaking down carbohydrates. During digestion, we swallow our chewed up food and it goes down the esophagus and into the stomach. In the stomach, the food is mixed with stomach acid and enzymes that break down proteins. The stomach also grinds the food into even smaller pieces. This process is called chemical digestion. For the stage of absorption, the food leaves the stomach and enters the small intestine. In the small intestine, enzymes from the pancreas and liver break down carbohydrates, proteins and fats. Even further nutrients are absorbed into the bloodstream through the small intestine lining and then carried to the rest of the body for use. Finally, in ingestion, the large intestine absorbs water and electrolytes from the remaining food waste. It forms into solid feces or poop, which is eliminated from the body. Fun facts. Your stomach can stretch to hold up to four liters of food and drink about the size of a large water bottle. It can take anywhere from twelve to seventy two hours for food to go all the way through your digestive system and come out as poop. Chewing gum can stimulate the production of digestive juices even though you're not eating anything, but your body cannot digest gum, so if you accidentally swallow it, it will pass through your digestive system and come out in your poop. The total length of the human intestine can range from twenty five to thirty five feet that's seven point six to ten point seven meters. Some foods, like broccoli and beans, can make you fart because they contain gas producing sugars that your body can't digest. So if you eat more broccoli, you're not only eating good food, but you can make even more stinky farts. Speaking of farts, did you know that they can travel up to ten feet per second, so if someone makes a stink in a crowded room, the smell can spread quickly. If you listen carefully, you can actually hear your stomach gurgle and growl as it digests your food. Can you hear it? In this episode, we started to learn about the digestive system and process. We learned what happens to our food from the time it enters our mouth until it is eliminated from our bodies as waste or poop. We also answered some questions about why don't animals have to wear clothes, how many pieces of hair are on our heads, and why do we get so dizzy when we spin around. We talked about the twelve major systems in the body and then went into a bit more detail about the digestive system. This episode was made with questions from Riley Nava and Morrow. I'd like to say thank you to Sarah from Abu Dhabi, Ellery from Massachusetts and Teddy Simpson. We hope to have a chance to use your ideas in future episodes. We love getting your feedback on our show. If you have any feedback, please be sure to send it our way, and also We would love it if you would leave us a review. Wherever you listen to podcasts, Your review might help others decide to listen to our show too. If you'd like to send us your questions, please send them to Hello at sleep titscience dot com. Thank you,