How Does The Intestine Work

Most people have a vague idea of having thin and thick hose intestines somewhere in their womb, strange tunnels through which foods pass through the digestion. Also, there are not many people who know how the intestines work.

The length of the intestine in the animal depends on the type of food to be fed. Carnivores have shorter intestines because the foods they take are digesting faster. It is assumed that people who are mostly fed on plant foods have longer intestine than people who mostly feed on meat.

The length of the intestine in a man is about 6.5 meters. When a man dies, intestines lose elasticity, so that their length reaches 8.5 meters.

The thickest part of the intestinal wall is composed of muscle fibers, so that the intestines can push the food that passes through them. Intestines mixes food with digestive juices and pushes it further. To accomplish this task, the small intestine has many curves.

In each curve, the food is slightly retarded and processed, mixed and digested for about 30 minutes; then switches to the next curve. Read also How do Gastric Bands Work!

The small intestine wall contains about 20 million of small glands, which secretes about 6 to 10 liters of digestive juice in the small intestine. It nourishes and softens the food so that it reaches the colon in the semi-liquid condition.

If you watched the wall of the intestine through a magnifying glass, you would see that it is not smooth, but is like velvet. It is covered with millions of small pepper-like resins, who participate in the process of digestion and absorb nutrients.

The food that can not be digested by juices, broken down in the colon by bacteria that live there. Billions of bacteria devastate the harsher parts of food, such as fruit shells, and recover from it substances that are beneficial to the organism.

This was just a superficial description of our intestine. They are the most important organs of our body.

5 unusual facts about intestine and digestive system

For 70 years of our lives through our intestines pass about 100 tons of food and 40 thousand liters of liquid.

Laundry detergents are very similar to our digestive system. At least as far as enzymes are involved, to break down stains. Among these enzymes are proteases, amylases and lipases.

Small intestine can be stretched to the surface of a whopping 250 square meters!

The winds stink due to bacteria from the digestive system. They are produced by a combination of swallowed air and gases created by fermentation of bacteria in the digestive tract.

Sword swallowing man helped to perfect the modern endoscope. Until 1868, endoscopes were inflexible, so German physician Adolf Kussmaul called for a professional sword swallowing man who could swallow nearly half a long instrument designed by Kussmaul.

Read also How Does Our Stomach Digest Food

Read also How does the Pancreas Work