Food's big trip
Your Organs
What do your organs do?
An organ is a body part with a big job. Your brain thinks, your lungs breathe, your stomach mashes food, and your kidneys clean your blood.
🤩 Fun fact: The brain cannot feel pain itself, even though it helps you feel everything else. 🧠 Brain →
About your organs (Organs)
An organ is a body part with a big job. Your brain thinks, your lungs breathe, your stomach mashes food, and your kidneys clean your blood.
Organs work in teams called systems. Your mouth, stomach and intestines are the digestive system. Your nose, windpipe and lungs are the breathing system. Your brain and nerves are the nervous system.
Most organs are packed snugly inside your chest and belly, kept safe by your ribs and backbone.
- Biggest organ insideliver
- Small intestineabout 20 feetabout 6.1 metres
- Brain cellsabout 86 billion
- Brain: Your brain is the boss of your body. It helps you think, feel, move and remember.
- Nerves (Spinal cord and nerves): Nerves are like wires that carry messages between your brain and every part of your body.
- Eyes: Your eyes catch light and send pictures to your brain so you can see.
- Ears: Your ears catch sounds and send them to your brain. They also help you keep your balance.
- Nose (Smell): Your nose lets air in, cleans it, and smells cookies, flowers and stinky socks too!
- Tongue: Your tongue is a strong, wiggly muscle that tastes your food and helps you talk.
- Teeth: Your teeth bite and chew your food into small pieces so you can swallow it.
- Voice box (Larynx): Your voice box is in your throat. It buzzes when you talk, sing, laugh or shout.
- Thyroid: Your thyroid is a little butterfly in your neck that helps your body grow and use energy.
- Windpipe (Trachea): Your windpipe is a tube that carries the air you breathe down to your lungs.
- Food pipe (Esophagus): Your food pipe is a squeezy tube that carries food from your mouth down to your stomach.
- Lungs: Your two lungs fill up with air like balloons, bringing in the oxygen your body needs.
- Liver: Your liver is a big, busy helper that cleans your blood and helps digest your food.
- Gallbladder: Your gallbladder is a little pouch that saves bile, a juice that helps you digest fat.
- Stomach: Your stomach is a stretchy bag that mashes your food into a soupy mush.
- Pancreas: Your pancreas makes juices to digest food and insulin to help your body use sugar.
- Spleen: Your spleen cleans your blood and helps your body fight germs.
- Small intestine: Your small intestine is a long, curly tube that soaks up the good stuff from your food.
- Large intestine (Colon): Your large intestine soaks up water from leftover food and turns the rest into poop.
- Appendix: Your appendix is a tiny pouch shaped like a finger, hanging off your large intestine.
- Kidneys: Your two kidneys clean your blood and turn extra water and waste into pee.
- Bladder: Your bladder is a stretchy bag that holds your pee until you go to the bathroom.
- Digestion (Digestive system): Digestion is the big journey your food takes, from your first bite all the way to poop.
⚔️ Boss fight: 🧠 Organs
Beat the Tummy Rumbler with what you know about your organs. Tap the parts above first if you need a hint.
Every stop on the way
- Chomp! Your teeth mash the food and your spit makes it soft and slippery.Spit a dayabout 3 cupsabout 720 ml More about the teeth →
- You swallow. A little flap shuts your windpipe so food goes down the right tube. More about the voice box →
- Your food pipe squeezes the food down, like toothpaste in a tube. It works upside down! More about the food pipe →
- Splash! Your stomach churns it into soup with acid, for a few hours.In the stomachabout 2 to 4 hours More about the stomach →
- Your small intestine is long and fluffy inside. It soaks up the good stuff.Small intestineabout 20 feetabout 6.1 metres More about the small intestine →
- The good stuff crosses into your blood, and your heart sends it everywhere. More about the capillaries →
- Your liver checks it all over, keeps some for later, and sorts out what doesn't belong. More about the liver →
- Your large intestine takes the water back, so you don't dry out. More about the large intestine →
- What's left is poop. It waits, and out it comes. The whole trip takes a day or more.The whole tripabout 1 to 3 days More about the digestion →
About food's big trip
Every bite you take goes on a long journey. It starts in your mouth and ends in the toilet, and on the way your body takes out everything it needs: the energy, the building blocks, the water.
The whole tube from your mouth to the end is called the digestive system. Laid out straight it would be far longer than you are tall, which is why it is folded up so neatly inside you.
Most of the trip you never feel at all. Your gut squeezes food along all by itself, day and night, without you thinking about it once.
- The whole tripabout 1 to 3 days
- Small intestineabout 20 feetabout 6.1 metres
- In the stomachabout 2 to 4 hours
🤩 Wow facts
- Your gut squeezes food along in waves, so swallowing works even upside down. Astronauts eat fine in space.
- Your stomach makes acid strong enough to hurt your skin, so it grows a new slimy lining about every few days to protect itself.
- The inside of your small intestine is covered in millions of tiny fingers called villi. They make the soaking-up surface huge.
- Your large intestine is home to trillions of friendly germs that help you finish digesting and make some vitamins for you.
- A rumbling tummy is just gas and liquid being squeezed along an empty gut. It is not really hunger talking.
- Food is not pushed down by gravity. It is squeezed, which is why you can drink lying down.
🙋 Questions kids ask
How long does food take to go all the way through?
Usually about a day to three days. It spends a few hours in your stomach, several hours in your small intestine, and the longest part of the wait is in your large intestine.
Why is poop brown?
Mostly because of a yellow-brown stuff called bile that your liver makes to help break up fat. Mixed with everything else, it comes out brown.
What happens if I swallow chewing gum?
It cannot be digested, so it just goes along with everything else and comes out in a day or two. It does not stay inside you for years.
Why do I burp?
Air you swallowed while eating, drinking or talking comes back up. Fizzy drinks have gas in them already, so they make more burps.
🧠 Quick quiz
Question 1 of 3Where does food go first after you swallow it?