The digestive system is one of the most important systems of the body, with which a person comes into contact most often. With its help, we obtain nutrients and also eliminate waste products. Therefore, many will be interested in getting acquainted with unique facts about the digestive system.
The human intestine contains approximately 1 kg of bacteria. The number of cells that make up these bacteria is significantly greater than the number of cells in the human body. 
Every year, 270,000 US residents are admitted to clinics with a diagnosis of gastrointestinal cancer, which affects the stomach, esophagus, rectum and colon. This could very well cause death. But in order to prevent this, you need to take care of your intestinal health in time. In order to eliminate dysbiosis and its symptoms in a timely manner, in order to restore 500 types of your own beneficial bacteria in the intestines, in order to maintain effectiveness when exposed to adverse factors, doctors recommend using Hilak Forte with real German quality. 
Seaweed is used when preparing sushi, which the Japanese love so much. Their intestines contain unique microbes that process carbohydrates in such algae much better than people of other nationalities. 
In the last century, in a number of countries, all children had to have their appendix removed in order to subsequently avoid appendicitis. Not so long ago it was discovered that the appendix should not be considered a vestige. It is very important for the functioning immune system, providing a haven for beneficial bacteria. If, after suffering from illnesses, the intestines lose their natural flora, then help can only be expected from the appendix. Besides, modern medicine learned to restore intestinal flora by using medicines, therefore, this property of the appendix has lost its former significance. 
If you eat something, then this food does not just fall into the stomach through the esophagus. This is due to the fact that the muscles of the esophagus tend to contract and relax. Such wave-like contractions are peristalsis, with the help of which food is pushed into the stomach through the canal. Even if a person hangs upside down and eats, food still ends up in the stomach due to peristalsis.
The diameter of the small intestine is approximately 2.5 cm and the length is 7 m. If you use these parameters of the small intestine, you can calculate its surface area. The result will be 0.6 square meters. meters. However, in reality the area of the small intestine is 250 square meters. meters, which is comparable to a tennis court.
The cells that are located on the inner walls of the stomach are capable of secreting about 2 liters of hydrochloric acid every day, which helps destroy bacteria and digest food. At the same time, hydrochloric acid is usually used in chemical agents to remove scale and rust from metal objects. The walls of the stomach are covered with a dense layer of mucus, which is necessary to protect against acid, but the mucus is not able to protect the stomach indefinitely, so it renews the layer a couple of times a month.
Have you ever wondered how exactly your body digests your favorite foods and drinks? Believe it or not, but our digestive system is very complex, and its operation depends on many components. Of course, everyone knows that thanks to digestion we receive the energy necessary for life, which enters our body from food. But that is not all! For example, the digestive system is also involved in removing all kinds of toxins from our body and in regulating many other processes. Such a significant part of our body deserves special attention, and if you agree with this statement, it’s time to learn something new about yourself. Before you is 25 interesting facts about the human digestive system, enjoy.
25. It only takes food 7 seconds to travel down the esophagus.
24. The length of the small intestine is approximately 6.7 meters, and the length of the large intestine is about 1.8 meters. 
Photo: LearnAnatomy
23. The length of the entire digestive system from the mouth to the anus is almost 9 meters. 
Photo: BruceBlaus
22. To break down food, your stomach uses hydrochloric acid, and at the same time to protect itself from this caustic solution, it produces gastric mucus. 
Photo: Wikipedia Commons.com
21. The human small intestine consists of three sections - the duodenum, jejunum and ileum. 
Photo: BruceBlaus
20. The stomach of an adult can hold approximately 1.5 liters of food at a time. 
Photo: FatGiVi
19. Contrary to popular belief, most of the digestive processes take place in the small intestine, and not in the stomach. 
Photo: Arnavaz / French Wikipedia, Medium69
18. A rumbling stomach is scientifically called “borborygmi,” and most often the cause of this loud rumbling is excess warm air in your intestines. 
Photo: shutterstock
17. Our salivary glands produce 1 to 2 liters of saliva per day. Now try not to think about the jar full of... 
Photo: Wikipedia Commons.com
16. There is a special connection between the intestines and the brain. Scientists have shown that emotions, including anger, sadness and anxiety, affect the digestion process. 
Photo: Pixabay.com
15. Enzymes in your stomach break down food into proteins, fats and carbohydrates. 
Photo: BruceBlaus
14. The occurrence of peptic ulcers is not associated with stress or poor diet. Researchers have found that the causative agent of this disease is a bacterium called Helicobacter pylori. 
Photo: Love Food Hate Waste NZ
13. The average American eats about 900 kilograms of food per year. 
Photo: Neil Rogers/flickr
12. The cause of belching lies in swallowing air while drinking carbonated drinks, chewing gum or smoking. 
Photo: Theron Price
11. The human colon consists of 4 sections and is responsible for excretion from the body after all nutrients have already been absorbed in the previous sections of the digestive system.
10. The esophagus redirects food from the mouth to the stomach, and special muscles help it in this mission. The process of “delivery” is called swallowing peristalsis. 
Photo: Database Center for Life Science (DBCLS)
9. Liver is the largest internal organ, and it performs over 500 different functions, including fighting infections and neutralizing toxins. 
Photo: Wikipedia Commons.com
8. The human digestive system does not depend on gravity, since food is transported by peristalsis (muscle contraction). This means that even while standing on your hands upside down, you will still be able to swallow food or drinks. Your digestive system will continue to function under almost any conditions. Although this is not the most pleasant way to eat or drink. 
Photo: Pixabay.com
7. In 1822, a fur trader was seriously injured abdominal cavity- he was accidentally shot from a musket with close range. The man underwent a series of operations and, fortunately, survived. At first, food kept literally falling out of the hole that had formed in the stomach. After the correction, the patient still had a gastric fistula (unclosed hole), and the doctors persuaded him to become a test subject to monitor the digestive process in real time. 
Photo: Wikipedia Commons.com
6. Flatulence is essentially the release of swallowed air and gases produced by bacteria living in your intestines.
5. The human intestine is a very complex ecosystem, home to 300 to 500 species of bacteria. 
Photo: Wikipedia Commons.com
4. The gastrointestinal tract of newborn babies is practically sterile, and the natural microflora begins in it after
A selection of interesting facts about digestion.
1. Your digestive tract is a 9-10 meter long tube that starts in your mouth and ends in your anus.
2. There are so many folds in the small intestine, down to the most microscopic ones, that total area its surface area is 250 square meters. This is enough to cover a tennis court, and the area of active (absorbing) surfaces of all parts of the intestine is, according to various estimates, up to 1300 square meters.
3. Digestion begins before you even eat anything. The sight and smell of food triggers salivation and the production of digestive juices. As soon as the first piece enters your mouth, all digestive systems begin to actively work.
4. Much of our knowledge about the structure and functioning of the digestive system comes from William Bemont, a military surgeon, and his patient, 19-year-old Alexis Martin, who received a massive abdominal wound as a result of military action in 1825. After surgical intervention The doctor was able to clearly observe the process of food passing through Alexis’ body for a long time.
5. It takes us about 72 hours to digest a holiday dinner. Carbohydrates, such as various pies and baked goods, are digested first. Dry, overcooked protein (fried chicken) will come next, and fats will take the longest, including sauces and whipped cream from the cake.
6. A person eats on average about 500 kg of food per year.
7. The mouth has a neutralizing function. It either cools or warms food to a temperature that is acceptable to the rest of the digestive tract.
8. Every day we produce about 1.7 liters of saliva. The amount of saliva is regulated by the autonomic nervous system, which means that the process occurs automatically. This is why we produce saliva at the mere sight, smell or thought of food.
9. The muscles of the digestive organs contract in wave movements and this process is called peristalsis. It is thanks to this that food will get into a person’s stomach, even if he eats while standing on his head.
10. The stomach has a huge capacity. On average, an adult's stomach can handle about 1 liter of food.
11. To digest food, you also need calories, which accounts for 5 to 15 percent of our energy expenditure.
12. Pica or perverted appetite is an eating disorder in which a person develops a need to eat inedible things such as paint, chalk and dirt. It occurs in 30 percent of children and the cause is unknown. There are suggestions that a lack of some minerals is to blame.
13. The main digestive juice is hydrochloric acid, which can dissolve metal, but plastic toys, pencils and hair come out the other end of the digestive tract almost unchanged.
14. What happens if you swallow gum? There is a myth that chewing gum remains in the stomach for 7 years before it is digested. It is not true. Our bodies really can't digest chewing gum, but it will pass through the stool relatively unchanged. In very rare cases, chewing gum too much and constipation can lead to a blockage in the intestines.
15. Most of the hormone serotonin, the main mood hormone, is produced not in the head, but in the stomach.
16. Sometimes the human body begins to eat itself. For example, with pancreatitis, pancreatic enzymes pass through the walls of the conducting channels and begin to corrode the surrounding tissue.
17. Water, enzymes, basic salts, mucus and bile create about 7.5 liters of fluid that enters our large intestine. And only about 6 tablespoons come out of this whole mixture.
18. The liver is the laboratory of our body. It performs more than 500 different functions, including nutrient storage, filtration and processing chemical substances in food, bile production and many others.
19. The loudest belch that was recorded was 107.1 decibels, which can be compared to the volume of a chainsaw. Its owner was the British Paul Hann, who demonstrated his abilities on television.
20. Flatulence or intestinal gas is a mixture of swallowed air, gas produced by a reaction in the stomach, and gas produced by bacteria in the digestive tract. This mixture consists of nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, hydrogen and methane.
21. digestive cycles
from 12:00 to 20:00 - reception eating and digestion;
from 20:00 to 4:00 am - digestion of food and its use by the body
from 4 am to 12:00 - waste disposal, self-cleansing of the body from unnecessary food debris.
To provide yourself with health, adequate nutrition and not gain excess weight, we must take into account the physiological cycles of our body.
A person does not interact with any other vital system of the body as often as with his own digestive system. Without it, a person would not be able to obtain nutrients from food and rid the body of waste products. Interesting and surprising facts about the digestive system await you further..
Food doesn't need gravity to get to the stomach
When you eat something, the food doesn't just fall down the esophagus into the stomach: the muscles in the esophagus contract and relax - these wave-like contractions are called peristalsis - so the food is pushed down a small channel down to the stomach. Thanks to peristalsis, even if you eat while hanging upside down, food can still reach your stomach.
Laxatives receive signals from the digestive system
Laxatives often contain several various classes enzymes including proteases, amylases and lipases. The human digestive system also contains these enzymes.
The digestive system uses these types of enzymes to dissolve food: proteases break down proteins, amylases break down carbohydrates, and lipases break down fats. For example, your saliva contains amylases and lipases, and your stomach and small intestine use proteases.
Most food is not digested in the stomach
It is generally accepted that the stomach is the center of the digestive system. This organ actually plays a large role in "mechanical digestion" - it takes large amounts of food and mixes it with gastric juice, physically breaking down the food into its components and turning it into a thick paste called chyme.
But the stomach plays a fairly small role in chemical breakdown, the process that reduces food to the molecular size necessary for nutrients to enter the bloodstream.
Most of the digestion and absorption of nutrients occurs in the small intestine, which makes up about two-thirds of the length of the gastrointestinal tract. After the chyme is further broken down by powerful enzymes, the small intestine absorbs the nutrients and sends them into the bloodstream.
The surface area of the small intestine is enormous
The length of the small intestine is about seven meters and the width is approximately 2.5 cm in diameter. Based on these measurements, it can be determined that the surface area of the small intestine is about 0.6 m². In fact, its area is about 250 m2, which is comparable to the area of a tennis court.
The small intestine has three features that increase its surface area. The intestinal walls are folded and also contain structures called villi, finger-like projections of absorptive tissue. Moreover, the villi are covered with microscopic projections - microvilli. All these features allow the small intestine to better absorb food.
Animals have different stomachs
The stomach is an integral part of the digestive system, but it looks different in different animals. Some animals have stomachs with multiple compartments: cows and other ruminants - giraffes, deer and cattle - have four-chambered stomachs, which helps them digest plant foods.
And in some species of animals, for example, seahorses, lungfish and platypuses, there is no stomach at all, and food passes directly from the esophagus to the rectum.
Intestinal gas smells bad due to bacteria
Intestinal gases are a combination of absorbed air and gases produced by fermentation of bacteria in the gastrointestinal tract. The digestive system cannot absorb only certain components of food - some substances simply enter the large intestine, where whole hordes of intestinal bacteria begin to work, releasing various gases, including carbon dioxide, hydrogen, methane and hydrogen sulfide.
The digestive system is prone to cancer
Each year, more than 270,000 Americans are hospitalized with gastrointestinal cancer, including cancer of the esophagus, stomach, colon and rectum. About half of such cases lead to death. In 2009, almost 52 thousand people died from colorectal cancer in the United States, this is the most big number deaths from cancer, excluding lung cancer.
Sword swallowers helped scientists look into the stomach
An endoscope is an instrument used to examine organs and cavities inside the body. German physician Philip Bozzini in the early 1800s developed a primitive version of the endoscope, called the lightleiter, designed to examine a number of areas of the body, including the ear, nasal cavity and urethra.
Half a century later, the French surgeon Antoine Jean Desormeaux developed another tool for studying the urinary tract and Bladder, which he called an "endoscope".
In 1868, German physician Adolf Kussmaul used an endoscope to look inside the stomach of a living person for the first time. Unlike today's endoscopes, Kussmaul's instrument was not flexible, so it was difficult to control. Therefore, Kassmaul used the experience of sword swallowers who were able to easily swallow a sword about 47 cm long and 1.3 cm wide - this is exactly the size of the device he developed.
A man with a hole in his stomach helped doctors study digestion
In 1822, a hunter accidentally shot a 19-year-old man named Alexis Saint-Martin. Army surgeon William Beaumont treated the victim, but left a hole in the abdomen called a fistula. This fistula allowed Beaumont to explore the stomach in a completely new way.
Over the next decade, Beaumont conducted 238 experiments on Saint-Martin, some of which involved injecting food directly into the patient's stomach. Beaumont made a number of important conclusions from his work, such as that digestion could be affected by fever, and that digestion was more than just grinding food in the stomach, requiring hydrochloric acid for digestion.
The stomach must protect itself from itself
Cells along the inner wall of the stomach secrete about two liters of hydrochloric acid daily, which helps kill bacteria and aids digestion. Outside the body, hydrochloric acid is commonly used in a variety of products to remove rust and scale from steel surfaces, and is also found in some detergents, including in toilet bowl cleaners.
To protect itself from caustic acid, the walls of the stomach are covered with a thick layer of mucus, but this mucus cannot protect the stomach indefinitely, so the stomach “renews” this layer every two weeks.
Doctors have been treating peptic ulcers incorrectly for nearly a century.
Peptic ulcers are ulcers on the mucous membrane of the stomach, esophagus or small intestine. According to 2007 research, this disease affects 50 million people annually in the United States alone.
Doctors have long believed that peptic ulcers are caused by stress and spicy foods. This explanation made sense, since patients often complained of sharp pains just after eating spicy food, so for almost 100 years doctors prescribed a course of treatment in the form of rest and a light diet.
In 1982, Australian scientists Barry Marshall and Robin Warren discovered that ulcers are caused by the bacterium Helicobacter Pylori, which invades the stomach lining. Thanks to this discovery, doctors came up with best treatment ulcers - antibiotics.
This discovery brought Marshall and Warren Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine in 2005.
Rumbling in the stomach can occur at any time, and not only when a person is hungry
The so-called gastric rumbles are the result of peristalsis of the stomach and small intestine. In other words, it is evidence of normal digestion, which occurs as food, liquids and gases pass through your gastrointestinal tract. When the digestive tract is empty, the sound is louder because there is nothing to muffle it.
But why do the muscles contract if there is nothing in the digestive tract?
After the stomach contents enter the small intestine, the digestive system sends signals to the brain, which responds by telling the digestive muscles to begin the process of peristalsis. Muscle contractions are needed to ensure that there is no excess food left in the stomach - as a result, a “false” signal is given that the body needs food.
Incredible facts
1. Your digestive tract is 9 meter pipe which begins in the mouth and ends in the anus.
2. There are so many folds in the small intestine, down to the most microscopic ones, that the total its surface area is 250 square meters. That's enough to cover a tennis court.
3. Digestion begins before you even eat anything.. The sight and smell of food triggers salivation and the production of digestive juices. As soon as the first piece enters your mouth, all digestive systems begin to actively work.
4. The ancient Roman physician Galen considered the stomach to be an animated being inside us, which is “capable of feeling emptiness, which stimulates us to seek food.”
5. To us it will take about 72 hours to digest the holiday dinner. Carbohydrates, such as various pies and baked goods, are digested first. Dry, overcooked protein (fried chicken) will come next, and fats will take the longest, including sauces and whipped cream from the cake.
6 people eats on average about 500 kg of food per year.
7. The mouth has a neutralizing function. It either cools or warms food to a temperature that is acceptable to the rest of the digestive tract.
8. Every day we we produce about 1.7 liters of saliva. The amount of saliva is regulated by the autonomic nervous system, which means that the process occurs automatically. This is why we produce saliva at the mere sight, smell or thought of food.
9. The muscles of the digestive organs contract in wave movements, and this process is called peristalsis. It is thanks to this food will end up in a person's stomach even if he eats while standing on his head.
10. The stomach has a huge capacity. Average An adult's stomach can handle about 1 liter of water.
11. To digest food, you also need calories, which accounts for 5 to 15 percent of our energy expenditure. Most energy is required to digest proteins and alcohol..
12. pica or perverted appetite is an eating disorder in which a person develops a need to eat inedible things such as paint, chalk and dirt. It occurs in 30 percent of children and the cause is unknown. There are suggestions that a lack of some minerals is to blame.
13. The main digestive juice is hydrochloric acid, which can dissolve metal, however, plastic toys, pencils and hair come out the other end of the digestive tract almost unchanged.
14. What happens if you swallow gum? There is a myth that chewing gum remains in the stomach for 7 years before it is digested. It is not true. Our bodies really can't digest chewing gum, but it will pass through the stool relatively unchanged. In very rare cases, chewing gum too much and constipation can lead to a blockage in the intestines.
15. Most of the hormone serotonin, the main mood hormone, is produced not in the head, but in the stomach.
16. With pancreatitis, your body literally begins to eat you from the inside.. The pain that occurs is due to the fact that fat-digesting enzymes leak from the pancreatic duct to other tissues, which practically eats you away.
17. Water, enzymes, basic salts, mucus and bile create about 7.5 liters of fluid, which enters our large intestine. And only about 6 tablespoons come out of this whole mixture.
18. The liver is the laboratory of our body. It performs more than 500 different functions, including nutrient storage, filtering and processing chemicals in food, bile production, and many others.
19. Loudest burp which was recorded was 107.1 decibels, which can be compared to the volume of a chainsaw. Its owner was the British Paul Hunn, who demonstrated his abilities on television, no more and no less.
20. Flatulence or intestinal gas is a mixture of swallowed air, gas produced by the reaction between acid in the stomach and gas produced by bacteria in the digestive tract. This mixture consists of nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, hydrogen and methane.
