How do we digest food?

You take a big bite of apple. Crunch! Where does it go after that? It begins a long, twisty trip through your body called digestion.

Chew, chew, chew

First your teeth get to work. They bite, grind and mash the apple into tiny soft pieces. Spit (your body calls it saliva) mixes in to make it slippery and easy to swallow. Down the food slides into your tummy.

A churning tummy

Your stomach is like a stretchy bag. It squeezes and squishes the food around and adds special juices that turn it into a warm, soupy mush. Round and round it churns, breaking the food into even smaller bits.

The long, winding tubes

Next the mush flows into your intestines — long, bendy tubes coiled up inside your belly. If you stretched them out, they would be longer than a bus!

As the mush travels along, the intestines soak up all the good bits — the energy to run and play and the tiny building blocks to grow. Those good bits pass into your blood, which carries them all over your body.

The leftover bits your body cannot use travel to the very end and leave as poo when you go to the toilet.

Wonder fact: All that chewing, churning and soaking takes a long time — your dinner can spend a whole day or more travelling through you!