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Like a house, the inside of your body contains a series of overlapping pipes and cables. You’ve read so far that your veins and arteries pick up and transport blood, oxygen, and other nutrients all over your body. Your neurons send messages throughout your brain and body to other neurons and muscles. And then you have the largest pipe (at least in terms of mass) in your body—the digestive tract. Like your house’s piping system, this digestive pipeline primarily has one way in and one way out—though it also has many, many other smaller entrances and exits that help deliver nutrients throughout your body. The typical travel pattern flows from top to bottom, except at times when gravity or illness force food and liquid back up, like in the cases of heartburn, roller coasters, or a tequila-induced hangover. Of course, high school biology class taught us the basics of digestion: Food passes through the esophagus into the stomach, then through twenty-six feet of small intestines, to rest finally in the colon, until you are ready to pass it out of your body. But the devil is in the details of this process, especially since this system has the complexity of a brain part and micromanages how you interact with the outside world of food and water. So let’s follow a piece of food along the digestive tract to see how things start—and how they end.
Mouth
The food-consumption process starts right here—in your body’s food processor. Though opera singers, politicians, and courtside fans are mostly known for what comes out of their mouths, what makes our mouths so special is how we handle what goes into it. For starters, consider your mouth to be like the guy who buckles you in on a ferris wheel—it’s there simply to prepare the food for the journey. We’re different from most other animals in the way we chew. A crocodile, for instance, has nail-like teeth so it can grab its food and rip it apart. While intimidating, it’s actually not energy-efficient, because it cannot start extracting energy until the food is halfway through its intestinal system. Elephants have grinding teeth; they’re flat teeth made to chew in a grinding motion, which allows them to eat all kinds of food but at a slow pace. Neither way is very efficient (in fact, elephants have to make new teeth to replace the worn-out ones throughout their lives; when they lose their last tooth, they die of starvation.)

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