The human body performs a lot of functions every day that are required for life. Digestion is one of the more important functions because it’s how we get energy. Most of our food sources are what are called “polymers”, which you can think of a bunch of beads on a string. Since we aren’t potatoes, we can’t reuse potato starch so we need to break down the polymer by breaking it into little beads so we can reassemble it in a form that’s useful for us. That’s the role of our digestion. The digestive system breaks the food down to small parts that are absorbed into the blood and then go to individual cells. These cells then build up the small parts into larger molecules that the human body can use. Without digestive functions, we wouldn’t be able to get any energy from food or have our cells make more molecules.

The beginning of the digestive system is a complicated series of signals sent from the brain to stomach which makes it so that your stomach fills up with the biological machines needed to break down food. Food then travels from the mouth to the stomach to the intestines. In the mouth it’s broken down by chewing, in the stomach it’s broken down chemically, and in the intestine the nutrients are absorbed. This is how our body digests food on a daily basis.