The digestive system is the part of your body that turns food into energy and waste into

poo. This is known as digesting.

History
The digestive system and how it works was not just discovered by one person but many over a long period of time. However, one of the main discoveries was by a man called William Beaumont. He discovered there was a thing called acid inside the stomach and that was what broke down the food. The way he figured it out was he got a person to swallow a piece of chicken that was tied to a piece of string but the person was not allowed to chew it. He then left it in the persons stomach for a while and then removed it. He came back after 4 hours and checked it and he pulled it out to find that it was smaller and some parts were missing. He found what he thought must be stomach acid acid on it. Acid breaks things down or dissolves things. So he then placed the acid on a different piece of food in a cup and watched the food break down. The parts of the digestive system include Mouth ,Esophagagus, stomach, Liver, Appendix, small intestine ,Large intestine, Pancreas, Gallbladder, Rectum and Anus.We eat around 500 KG a year!! You might be thinking how come I am not super obese. Well, it is because we burnt it all off by exercising. The stomach is a muscle sac that lies between the Esophagagus and the Small intestine. The stomach was discovered in 1497. An adults stomach hold approximately 1.5 litres of liquid within 2-6 hours, all food is emptied into the small intestine. The mouth is the first part of the digestive system. The pancreas digests and controls sugar, lollies, ice cream, chocolate and anything sweet!

Description
The digestive system started working even before you took the first bite of your pizza. And the digestive system will be busy at work on your chewed-up lunch for the next few hours - or sometimes days, depending upon what you've eaten. This process, called digestion, it allows your body to get the nutrients and energy it needs from the food you eat. So let's find out what's happening to that pizza! Even before you eat, when you smell a tasty food, see it, or think about it, digestion begins. Saliva, or spit, begins to form in your mouth. When you do eat, the saliva breaks down the chemicals in the food a bit, which helps make the food mushy and easy to swallow. Your tongue helps out, pushing the food around while you chew with your teeth. When you're ready to swallow, the tongue pushes a tiny bit of mushed-up food called a bolus toward the back of your throat and into the opening of your oesophagus. The oesophagus is like a stretchy pipe that's about 25 centimetres long. It moves food from the back of your throat to your stomach. But also at the back of your throat is your windpipe, which allows air to come in and out of your body. When you swallow a small ball of mushed-up food or liquids, a special flap called the epiglottis flops down over the opening of your windpipe to make sure the food enters the esophagus and not the windpipe. 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. So now the pizza is in your stomach. Your stomach is attached to the end of the esophagus, is a stretchy sack shaped like the letter J. The stomach has three important jobs: 1. to store the food you've eaten

2. 3.

to break down the food into a liquid mixture to slowly empty that liquid mixture into the small intestine

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 juices that also come from the stomach's walls. The gastric juices help break down the food and kill bacteria that might be in the food. The food is now small enough to go onto the next stage of the digestive track the small intestine. The small intestine is a long tube that's about 3.5 to 5 centimetres around, and it's packed inside you beneath your stomach shaped as lots of s bends. If you stretched out an adult's small intestine, it would be about 6.7 meters which is like one and half punch buggies The small intestine breaks down the food mixture even more so your body can start to absorb the food and energy it needs - all the vitamins, minerals, proteins, carbohydrates, and fats. So it depends on the food youre eating. For example the chicken you had on your pizza is full of proteins and a little fat and the small intestine can help extract (take out and absorb) them with a little help from three friends: the pancreas, liver, and gallbladder. Your food may spend as long as 4 hours in the small intestine and will become a very thin, watery mixtu re. Its time well spent because, at the end of the journey, the nutrients from your pizza can pass from the small intestine into the blood. The blood with all the nutrients comes directly to the liver for processing. The liver is like a filter. Sorting out the harmful substances or wastes, and the nutrients that will stay in the body. Some of the waste is turned into bile (which is that yuk tasting green/brown fluid). The liver even helps figure out how many nutrients will go to the rest of the body, and how many will stay behind in storage. For example, the liver stores certain vitamins and a type of sugar your body uses for energy. Next is the large intestine, it is fatter than the small intestine (about 7 to 10 centimetres around). It is also packed into the body but only measures about 1.5 meters if you spread it out. This is almost the last stop on the digestive tract. So now the nutrients are in the body but what about the waste, the stuff your body can't use? This stuff needs to be passed out of the body. Ill give you a clue. It goes out with a flush. Before it goes, it passes through the part of the large intestine called the colon, which is where the body gets its last chance to absorb the water and some minerals into the blood. As the water leaves the waste product, what's left gets harder and harder as it keeps moving along, until it becomes a solid. Yep, it's poop (also called stool or a bowel movement). The large intestine pushes the poo into the rectum, the very last stop on the digestive tract. The solid waste stays here until you are ready to go to the bathroom. When you go to the bathroom, you are getting rid of this solid waste by pushing it through the anus.

Problems
One of the most common problem in the digestive system is Appendicitis which is when the appendix become swollen. Appendicitis comes from the appendix the appendix is not needed in the digestive system. Our body has evolved from a time when we ate a lot of grass but now we do not need it. But Bunny rabbits still do the use it to digest grass. When you get sore at the side of your stomach it does not happen right away it happens constantly until it happens so badly that you almost cannot breathe! Then you are taken to hospital and your appendix are removed but no replacement is needed because appendix are not needed. Celiac disease is a digestive disease that damages the small intestine and takes nutrients from food. People who have celiac disease cannot eat gluten, a protein in wheat and barley. Gluten is found in lots of foods and sometimes even medicines. Another problem is diabetes type 1 it comes from the pancreas it is where the pancreas stops producing insulin. Insulin is a liquid that turns sugar in

food into energy and our body really needs it!! But there is a way diabetics can survive they take insulin that has been made by scientists and they can just inject it into themselves and live happily.

Care
There are many ways to look after the digestive system. One of the ways is to eat healthily and not to eat too much or too little. There are lots of ways to home care for the digestive system but appendicitis is not one of them if you feel you might have contact a health doctor or go to a emergency room.

Future
In the future doctors will hopefully find a cure dibties type 1. They are also thinking of inventing a tablet to make the digestive system to work faster. We also hope they can prevent deaths that sometimes accrue in the digestive system.

Thank-you We hope you learned a lot!!