CoachFood travels through the digestive tract, one long tube running right through the body:
- the mouth, where teeth grind (Chapter 12) and saliva moistens;
- the esophagus, the slide from throat to stomach;
- the stomach, a muscular pouch where food is churned and mixed with digestive juices for hours;
- the small intestine, a folded tube several metres long, where digestion finishes and the food’s goodness passes into the body;
- the large intestine, where water is reclaimed from what remains, before the leftovers leave the body.
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Example 25.2 (Timing the journey)
The bite of bread spends seconds in the mouth, a couple of seconds sliding down the esophagus, some hours being churned in the stomach, several more working through the small intestine, and up to a day or more finishing in the large intestine. The whole journey commonly takes one to two days.
Example 25.4 (The bread turns sweet)
Chew a piece of plain bread very long — a slow count of sixty — and a faint sweetness appears. Nothing was added: saliva is already dismantling the bread into simpler, sweeter pieces. You have tasted digestion beginning.
Example 25.8 (The stomach-ache detective)
Wolfed-down lunch, then a sprint: the classic afternoon stomach ache. The meal was swallowed half-chewed (rule 1 broken) and the digesting stomach was hurried into a race (rule 5). The fix is not medicine but manners — toward one’s own digestive tract.