Category Kids Queries

When you eat, you don’t swallow just your food. You also swallow air, which contains gases like nitrogen and oxygen. Small amounts of these gases travel through your digestive system as you digest your food. Other gases like hydrogen, carbon dioxide, and methane are made when food is broken down in the large intestine. All of these gases in the digestive system have to escape somehow, so they come out as farts!

Gases are also what can make farts smell bad. Tiny amounts of hydrogen, carbon dioxide, and methane combine with hydrogen sulfide and ammonia in the large intestine to give gas its smell. Phew!

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The process of digestion that started in your mouth continues in your stomach. This expandable organ is lined with mighty muscles that pummel your food. A sea of gastric juices, meanwhile, dissolves your dinner into a thick paste called chyme (pronounced kyme), which dribbles slowly to its next port of call, the small intestine, where the bulk of digestion takes place. This 20-foot (6-m) tube coils through your abdomen and teams with other organs (along with colonies of bacteria) to absorb nutrients from everything you eat. It’s followed by the large intestine, which sops up chyme’s excess water and minerals.

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Because your body is gearing up for digestion, the process that converts food into energy (and into some yucky stuff, too, but we’ll get to that in a bit). Glands in your mouth secrete a watery substance called saliva (aka spit), which contains chemicals that help melt chewed food into slimy gobs of mush – each called a bolus – for easier swallowing. Your tongue herds every bolus to the back of your throat and drops it into your esophagus, a pipe that squeezes everything you eat into your stomach.

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Although it might sound like growling coming from a throat, that rumbling and grumbling you hear comes from the stomach and the small intestine. And it happens at all sorts of times — not just when you’re hungry!

As the muscles of your digestive system push food through the digestion process, the food gets broken down to be used by your body. In addition to the food and liquids that move through your digestive system, gas and air bubbles also get into the mixture.

It is these pockets of gas and air that make the sounds you know as stomach growling. They’re not as loud when you have food in your stomach, because the food absorbs some of the sound.

When your stomach is empty, though, these sounds are much more noticeable. That’s probably why we associate stomach growling with being hungry. A couple hours after you eat, your stomach sends signals to your brain to get your digestive system muscles working again.

This process cleans up any food that was missed earlier. The stomach muscle contractions also help to make you hungry, so you eat more food that your body needs. When these muscle contractions get going again and your stomach is empty, those gas and air pockets make a lot more noise that you hear as stomach growling.

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Proper hydration – drinking enough liquids – is even more important to your body than proper nutrition. Water is a simple remedy for people who suffer from constipation, and another look at the body’s interrelated parts helps explain why. Every day, the kidneys rely on water to filter between 120 and 150 quarts of blood and 1 to 2 quarts of urine. But if the kidneys malfunction, excess fluid and waste can accumulate in the body. Water is the key to ensuring that the kidneys function as they should and wastes are flushed from the body.

Lack of water can lead to dehydration — a condition that occurs when you don’t have enough water in your body to carry out normal functions. Even mild dehydration can drain your energy and make you tired.

Every day you lose water through your breath, perspiration, urine and bowel movements. For your body to function properly, you must replenish its water supply by consuming beverages and foods that contain water.

So how much fluid does the average, healthy adult living in a temperate climate need? The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine determined that an adequate daily fluid intake is:

• About 15.5 cups (3.7 liters) of fluids for men
• About 11.5 cups (2.7 liters) of fluids a day for women

These recommendations cover fluids from water, other beverages and food. About 20 percent of daily fluid intake usually comes from food and the rest from drinks.

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We can’t live on air and sunshine alone. The human body needs food and water to survive.

A human can go for more than three weeks without food (Mahatma Gandhi survived 21 days of complete starvation), but water is a different story.

At least 60% of the adult body is made of it and every living cell in the body needs it to keep functioning. Water acts as a lubricant for our joints, regulates our body temperature through sweating and respiration, and helps to flush waste.

The maximum time an individual can go without water seems to be a week – an estimate that would certainly be shorter in difficult conditions, like broiling heat.

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