Health starts in your gut

Digestion starts even before you start eating. When you see, smell or even think about something delicious, your brain is already sending signals to your stomach. Try it for yourself: think of a juicy apple. Do you notice that your mouth is already watering? Then the process of digestion has already started. Your brain is already sending signals to the organs so that the body can prepare itself.

So digesting food starts in the mouth – and you can make a good contribution right away. In fact, chewing properly is very important. It triggers saliva production, and breaks down the food into smaller pieces. By eating slowly and chewing well, you make sure you feel full sooner and don’t overeat. By mixing the food well with saliva, you can swallow it more easily: into the oesophagus it goes.

You can think of the oesophagus as a muscular tube. With squeezing and pushing movements, that tube sends food to your stomach. At the same time, the oesophagus protects you from rising stomach acid. There is a sphincter muscle at the transition from the oesophagus to the stomach. That muscle can let the food pass through to the stomach, meanwhile holding back stomach acid.

The stomach kneads the food, making it smaller and finer. It also mixes the food with gastric juice. That juice is very acidic. It contains all kinds of substances that make sure the food is digested properly. Most food sits in your stomach for two to three hours. Fatty food stays a bit longer. When your stomach has processed everything, the food is passed, a bit at a time, to the small intestine.

At the beginning of the small intestine, food is mixed with enzymes. These are proteins that break down the food into small pieces. These are nutrients so small that they are absorbed into the blood through the intestinal wall.

The nutrients are transfered to the blood and pass through the portal vein to the liver. You can compare the liver to a factory. Every minute, the liver receives about 1.5 litres of blood. The organ filters the blood. Good nutrients are allowed to pass through. Toxins are stopped and broken down by the liver.

If we call the liver a factory, the gallbladder is the storehouse. It is a yellow-green sac that sits under your liver. It stores bile, a substance made by the liver. The gallbladder springs into action when you have eaten something with fat. To digest fat, you need bile, which is stored in the gallbladder. The gallbladder receives a signal to send bile fluid to the small intestine.

This gland makes the digestive juices containing enzymes. These substances are needed to cut up food into small pieces at the beginning of the small intestine. The pancreas also regulates your blood sugar levels, by making the hormones insulin and glucagon. That first one lowers blood sugar levels, and the latter raises them. When your pancreas is working properly, these hormones are in balance.

This is the end of the journey through the body. The food is now almost completely digested, except for the fibres. These serve as food for the many bacteria that live in your colon. The colon still extracts some water and salts from the food. The mass that remains becomes thicker and thicker. This becomes your stool. The colon makes squeezing movements, pushing the mass to the end of the colon.

This is the last part of your colon. Is your rectum full? Then a signal is sent to your brain and you feel an urge. Time to visit the toilet!

This is the collective name for all the bacteria, yeasts and fungi in our intestines. They help digest food, protect the intestinal wall, support the immune system and stimulate intestinal movement. There is increasing attention from science for this ‘new’ organ, which is very influential on our health.