Sickening Stomachs.....
After yet another VERY busy week, we have moved on to another part of our interesting human body.....The Digestive System! We had a fantastic time reading this fun, interactive book all about our digestive system, it explains all about what happens to your food once it enters your body.......and we can assure you..........it .......is......not.....pretty!!!
Digestion is an important body process where the food we eat, gets converted into substances which can be absorbed by the body. This is the our bodies can get the energy they need to function. For more information on the digestive systems check out this awesome link we found, by clicking on THE DIGESTIVE SYSTEM.
After we had a closer look at the first parts of the digestive system (the mouth, saliva and oesophagus). We decided to have a closer look at how our stomach works to further break down our food so that it can be absorbed through the walls of our small intestine.
Mrs M found a cool 'stomach making' experiment for us to try to 'get a feel' for how our stomachs work! We started by pretending to 'chew' a slice of bread by tearing it into small pieces and placing it into a Zip Lock bag, which would be our 'stomach'.
We then adding the 'acidic gastric juices' (cooldrink, lemon juice and water) that our stomach wall releases when there is food in our stomach. After that, we used our hands as the stomach wall muscles to contract and mix the contents of our stomach up. It was amazing to see just how quickly the 'food' broke down into a liquid! ......and we had HEAPS OF FUN!
Digestive
System Function Facts
- We eat about 500kg of food per year. 1.7 liters of saliva is produced each day.
- The esophagus is approximately 25cm long.
- Muscles contract in waves to move the food down the esophagus. This means that food would get to a person's stomach, even if they were standing on their head.
- An adults stomach can hold approximately 1.5 liters of material.
- Every day 11.5 liters of digested food, liquids and digestive juices flow through the digestive system.
- If you laid an adults small intestine out flat, it would be about 7 meters long and the large intestine would be 1.5 meters long.Here's something interesting you should know. A cow's digestive system is quite complex. It's stomach is divided into four parts.
The first part helps to soften the food, the second sends the food back to the mouth where it get chewed again, the third part removes moisture from the food, and the last which is fourth part mixes the food with digestive juices. Complex, right?
Happy digesting!
