Let’s Talk About Digestion.

You may wonder, why I care about digestion. It’s boring. Maybe you learned it in science class, years ago. If I’m going to talk and teach about what comes out- we need to know how it gets there. Often when working with people’s pelvic floor dysfunction I see concurrent GI symptoms and have to figure out which came first. Chicken or the egg?

The GI system is like a long highway. It starts in the mouth and ends up you know where. Everything gets chewed up and mixed with saliva in the mouth. FUN FACT: You actually absorb more nutrients if you are intentionally thinking about your food as you ingest it. It’s true, there’s research on it. Next, that mixture travels down through the esophagus and enters the stomach. Things are broken down by the stomach acid here. People can have issues if there’s too little or too much. After about 2-5hrs that substance (called chyme) is moved into the small intestine. Here, everything is broken down even further. The body absorbs most of the nutrients here, which can then enter the bloodstream. This also takes about 2-5hrs, depending on the person. It passes through about 22 feet of small intestine and then enters the large intestine through the ileocecal valve. The large intestine is where most of the fluid absorption occurs. Everything travels through the large intestine and enters into the rectum, which is where it is eventually emptied from.