Your stomach contains acid as strong as car battery acid it can actually dissolve metal and bone
Contents Introduction Body Fuel Eating The Food Masher Guts The Chemical Refinery Chemical Powerhouse Warm Body Staying Pure Body of Water Waste Disposal The History of the Digestive System More Gutsy Facts Index 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 22 24 26 28 30 32
Introduction Eating gives you a constant supply of fuel and materials that keep your body going But food comes in big lumps That’s where your digestive system plays its part Your digestive system is an amazing chemical refinery that breaks down food into the chemicals your body needs Then it absorbs them all into your blood for distribution around the body The Big Meal Every year the average person in the United States eats about 0 55 tons 0 5 metric tons of food Typically Americans eat over 75 pounds 34 kilograms of red meat beef veal pork and lamb and 54 pounds 24 kg of poultry chicken and turkey So altogether Americans eat nearly 20 million tons 18 million metric tons of meat every year That’s about 160 billion quarter-pounder burgers If all the red meat eaten by Americans each year were cows they could form a continuous line of cattle stretching nose to tail all the way from New York City to Los Angeles California and back nine times 3,941 ki 2,449 mi lometer les Los Angeles New York s Fed Up In the last fifty years more and more people have been eating too much or doing too little exercise So far more people are overweight than ever before The World Health Organization describes those who are extremely overweight as obese and they say that 1 billion or so people around the world are obese Obesity can cause health problems such as heart disease and diabetes 6
Basic Foods Although we eat a far greater range of food than most other animals we rely on a small range of simple basic foods known as staples These include maize wheat and rice and they are crucial for giving us vital energy Amazingly just fifteen food plants provide 90 percent of the energy needs of the whole world Cooking Humans are the only animals that cook their food We cannot really digest much raw meat so cooking softens it and allows us to eat and digest nearly any kind of meat Meat contains a lot of protein and some scientists think discovering how to make it edible by cooking is what gave humans such clever brains Fast Work While no one can live more than a few days without water people can survive weeks or even longer without food The famous Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi managed to survive twenty-one days without food But going without food or living only on poor quality food can make you sick 7
