Professor Dave again, let’s digest some food.
We just completed our understanding of how we take in oxygen from the atmosphere and
distribute it around the body, but our cells need more than just oxygen.
We need nutrients to sustain our bodily functions, which means we need to eat food.
And that food needs to get broken down into tiny components that cells can use for energy
production, so how does this work?
Let’s look at the digestive system now.
The digestive system can be split up into two parts.
The alimentary canal, also known as the gastrointestinal tract, or GI tract, is essentially one long
continuous tube that starts at your mouth, where food goes in, and winds all the way
down the body to end at the anus, where some of the food comes back out.
Along the way, much of the food is broken down into molecular fragments that can be
absorbed through the lining of this tract and into the blood that surrounds.
The rest of the digestive system is made up of accessory digestive organs like the teeth,
tongue, gallbladder, salivary glands, liver, and pancreas, which are not part of the GI
tract, but have a considerable role in digestion.
All of these components work together to produce a sequence of six actions.
First, ingestion.
This is the basic act of eating, meaning putting food into your mouth.
Next is propulsion.
This begins when you swallow the food, and continues with involuntary peristalsis, which
is part of the autonomic nervous system.
These actions push food along the GI tract, down the pharynx, and esophagus, and down
into the stomach, eventually continuing through the intestines and out the anus.
This happens with the help of an action called segmentation, or successive local constrictions
in the GI tract.
The third is mechanical breakdown, which begins by using teeth and saliva, and continues with
further breakdown by digestive juices in the stomach, a very acidic environment due to
the presence of gastric acid, which contains hydrochloric acid.
Next is the part that is more formally referred to as digestion.
This is when enzymes go and perform highly directed chemical reactions to break down
all the polymers in the food.
They break proteins down into individual amino acids, polysaccharides into individual monosaccharides,
and so forth, which is categorically different than the earlier mechnical methods of breakdown.
Next, once everything is broken down as much as it can be, absorption will occur, where
all of these nutrients pass through the lining of the small and large intestines into blood
and lymph on the other side.
Finally, anything that is not absorbed by the body will be dealt with during defecation,
where it is expunged from the body in the form of feces.
All of this is aided by specific chemical stimuli that activate certain reflexes, some
of which are mediated by the central nervous system.
Let’s start out by taking a closer look at some of the organs of this system.
Most of these sit in the abdominopelvic cavity.
The peritoneum is the membrane of this cavity, and it is divided into the visceral peritoneum,
covering the surfaces of these organs, and the parietal peritoneum, lining the body wall,
with the peritoneal cavity in between, containing a serous fluid that lubricates the organs
for ease of mobility.
Blood is supplied to these organs via the splanchnic circulation.
Now let’s get a closer look at the GI tract as a whole, to see the basic structure that
surrounds the lumen of the tract.
The innermost layer is the mucosa, or mucous membrane.
This secretes digestive enzymes and hormones into the tract, and also absorbs digested
food into the blood.
It is made of a single columnar epithelium, followed by a lamina propria made of loose
areolar connective tissue, and then the muscularis mucosae, made of smooth muscle.
Beyond this is the submucosa, which is made of areolar connective tissue, and full of
blood vessels, lymphatic vessels, lymphoid follicles, and nerve fibers, and we can see
these entering through a mesentery.
Digested food just has to get to this layer in order for nutrients to spread all over
the body.
Surrounding this layer is the muscularis externa, which is the muscular layer that performs
segmentation and peristalsis, which help the food along the tract as we discussed earlier.
It is made of an inner circular layer and an outer longitudinal layer.
And lastly, we continue to find the serosa.
This is areolar connective tissue covered with a single layer of squamous epithelial
cells that form a mesothelium.
We should also note the intrinsic nerve plexuses, which are the submucosal nerve plexus in the
submucosa and the myenteric nerve plexus in the muscularis externa.
These allow for communication all along the GI tract and regulate digestive system activity.
Now that we have the basics down regarding the GI tract, let’s look at the accessory organs.
We already talked a bit about the mouth, or the oral cavity, when discussing the sense
of taste, so here we will just highlight the features relevant to digestion.
The walls of the mouth are lined with a thick stratified squamous epithelium, and the oral
mucosa produces antimicrobial peptides called defensins, since this region will need a lot
of protection from the elements.
We can also see the hard and soft palate, the uvula, and the palatine tonsils.
The tongue is made of skeletal muscle fibers, and is secured to the floor of the mouth by
the lingual frenulum.
Salivary glands produce saliva which cleans the mouth, moistens and dissolves food, and
contains enzymes that begin breaking down certain foods.
Teeth also help this process during mastication, or chewing, which grinds food down into smaller pieces.
The growth and development of teeth requires its own tutorial, so for now, let’s continue
down to the pharynx.
Food will move through the oropharynx and laryngopharynx, just like air does when we
breathe, but with the larynx covered by the epiglottis, the food will then move into the
esophagus.
This is a muscular tube that joins the stomach at the cardial orifice within the abdominal cavity.
The esophagus wall has the basic structure that we described earlier, although at this
junction with the stomach, stratified squamous epithelium that is abrasion-resistant will
change into simple columnar epithelium, which is ideal for secretion.
In the stomach, food enters through the cardia and is converted into a paste called chyme.
We can also see the dome-shaped fundus, the body, and longitudinal folds called rugae.
Zooming in, we can see gastric pits, which lead into tubular gastric glands, which is
where the gastric juice is produced.
This generates a very acidic environment, with a pH between 1.5 and 3.5, that is necessary
for pepsin to do its work, the enzyme that digests proteins.
The stomach needs a mucosal barrier to withstand these acidic conditions, so that it is not
broken down along with the food, and this is achieved by a lot of mucus sitting on top
of tightly joined epithelial cells that are constantly regenerated by stem cells beneath.
The stomach narrows to form the pyloric part, made of the pyloric antrum and the pyloric
canal, which ends at the pyloric sphincter, and then leads to the duodenum.
Chyme travels through here into the small intestine.
This is where digestion is completed and almost all of the absorption occurs.
There are three sections, the first of which is the duodenum, followed by the jejunum and
the ileum.
The duodenum contains the hepatopancreatic ampulla, which is where the bile duct, delivering
bile from the liver, and the main pancreatic duct, delivering pancreatic juice from the
pancreas, join and merge with the small intestine.
The other two sections are longer and hang in coils, joining the large intestine at the
ileocecal valve.
The small intestine is perfect for absorption of nutrients.
It is very long to begin with, and the circular folds, fingerlike villi, and much tinier microvilli
amplify the absorptive surface area even more so.
Crypt epithelial cells secrete intestinal juice, which contains mucus and helps with
the absorption.
The mucosa of the small intestine is also where we will find Peyer’s patches, the
lymphoid nodules we learned about when we looked at the lymphatic system.
At this point we should mention three more accessory organs which are associated with
the small intestine.
These are the liver, gallbladder, and pancreas.
The liver performs many metabolic and regulatory tasks, but in a digestive context, its purpose
is to produce bile, which enters at the duodenum.
This yellow-green substance breaks down fats for digestion.
And the gallbladder is a tiny muscular sac adjoining the liver that serves mainly to
store bile.
Looking more closely at the liver, we see four primary lobes separated by ligaments.
Zooming in more closely still, we see smaller units called liver lobules.
These are hexagonal structures made of liver cells called hepatocytes radiating outward
from a central vein, and with a portal triad at each corner.
This name refers to the fact that each triad consists of a bile duct, as well as an arteriole
and a venule, carrying blood to and from the liver.
Bile is secreted and flows through bile canaliculi, towards the bile ducts in the portal triads,
eventually leaving the liver through the common hepatic duct towards the duodenum.
Moving on to the pancreas, this is a large gland attached to the duodenum via the main
pancreatic duct, and it produces pancreatic juice, which contains a wide variety of enzymes
that help break down food.
We can see clusters of acinar cells surrounding ducts, this is where enzyme production takes place.
And lastly, once food has made it all the way through the small intestine, almost all
of the water and nutrients have been absorbed, and what remains is more or less indigestible
once it enters the large intestine, which frames the small intestine on three sides.
This serves to continue absorbing more water from these food residues, and also compact
them into fecal matter, which is eliminated from the body through the anus.
The large intestine is comprised of three bands of smooth muscle called the tenia coli,
sacs called haustra, and tiny fat-filled pouches called epiploic appendages.
It is also split into regional subdivisions, these being the cecum, appendix, colon, rectum,
and anal canal.
The cecum is the first section when entering from the small intestine.
Attached to this is the appendix, which contains lymphoid tissue.
The colon is split up into the ascending colon, transverse colon, and descending colon, for
obvious reasons relating to the direction of travel during those segments, as well as
the sigmoid colon.
This then feeds into the rectum, and finally the anal canal.
So that covers the basics regarding the digestive system, and provides a rough picture of what
happens to food from the moment it goes in your mouth, all the way through to the other side.
There is plenty more to be said regarding the mechanism of digestion.
Each type of biomolecule, whether protein, carbohydrate, fat, or otherwise, will require
specific enzymes to be broken down, and these pathways are worth examining in detail.
But that will have to wait for a nutrition series in the near future.
For now, let’s keep going and wrap things up with a few more systems.