Your stomach

Your stomach is a very busy place! Everything you eat or drink gets processed in your stomach but it is not digested there. Your stomach just prepares the food so that your intestines can take as many nutrients as it can from the food you have eaten.

Your stomach is a large stretchy sack, shaped like the letter ‘J’. It has very strong muscles that mix the food around with the acid that is already in your stomach in a mixture that is called ‘chyme’. Mixing the chyme breaks it down into a liquid mixture that your intestines can manage and the very strong acids also kill off any bacteria that you may have eaten by mistake!

Your stomach has glands that produce lots of gastric (this just means stomach) juices. These contain many different chemicals like pepsin, an enzyme that digests proteins in foods like meat, eggs or dairy products and acids, like hydrochloric acid. The acids in your stomach are very strong and could do lots of damage to your body. Luckily, the inside of your stomach is very tough so it can handle the acids! Your stomach needs to be ready to process food so if you see, smell or taste food, the gastric glands produce gastric juices in preparation for the food that is about to arrive.

If you are ‘pretending’ to eat, like if you chew gum, your stomach thinks its going to get food and gets ready. Because you are chewing but not swallowing any food, the gastric juices don’t have anything to work on so they can end up damaging your stomach! Your stomach is very tough but if there are lots of times where there is no food in your stomach, the damage can become so bad that an ulcer (a hole) will form. This is very painful indeed and needs to be treated by a doctor.

Your stomach acts as a storage area for the food you eat. If your stomach couldn’t stretch and hold a full meal, you would have to eat tiny bits of food, all day long! At the end of your stomach is a tight ring of muscles called the ‘pyloric sphincter’. The job of the pyloric sphincter is to make sure that the chyme from your stomach is released to your duodenum (the beginning of your small intestine) in small, manageable bits. This way, your small intestine can absorb all of the nutrients it can from the meal you have eaten, bit by bit.

Did you know…?
Your stomach is very stretchy – it can hold up to 3 pints of fluids!