Blog

Food enters your mouth first. When you’re ready to swallow, it goes down the long oesophagus into your stomach. From there, food goes into the small intestine where the body takes up most of the nutrients. The food then goes into your large intestine and is passed as poo out of your rectum.

Nearly all the pigments in your food get digested, broken down or absorbed before they become poo (red from beetroot being one exception). Poo is always brown because your body is always getting rid of old red blood cells. As part of that process, a brown chemical called stercobilin comes out of your intestine and into your poo!

The chewed-up ball of food that you swallow is called a bolus. Once the bolus reaches the stomach and mixes with stomach juices, it is called chyme. As chyme travels through the small intestine, it gets thicker and picks up waste. After traveling through the large intestine, the chyme is called stool or feces. Gurgitate is a made-up word!

Even though the small intestine is just a 3-centimetre wide tube, it is long, it has lots of folds and it is covered by lots of finger-like structures called microvilli. All these features increase the area inside of the small intestine that food can touch as it goes through – all the better to absorb nutrients!

Yep, swallowing air can make you fart – you might swallow excess air if you eat or drink too fast, suck on hard lollies or drink fizzy drinks. Eating high fibre foods can make you fart for a different reason. Healthy bacteria in your gut break the fibre down and make gas in the process!