How long does it take to digest food
There is no any accurate answer of the question of how long does it take to digest food. In general, our digestive system takes 24 to 72 hours to digest the foods we take. Actually, it is very difficult to find out an exact time. Because it depends on the amount of food you take.
Otherwise, the types of the foods are also responsible to tract out the exact time. We know that some foods are soft and easily digestible but some are difficult to digest by our digestive system. So, time varies to digest food.
When we take food, at first the foods go through the digestive system within six to eight hours. Then it moves through our small intestine, large intestine and stomach to start digesting process.
A clinical study claims that the average time of staying foods in large intestine varies by gender to gender. It takes 33 hours for men and 47 hours for women.
The process of digestion foods
Digestion is a difficult process that breaks down the food items in pieces and presses out the all nutrients inside the foods to operate our whole system. And the rest and wastages remove from our body. There are five main parts of our digestive system.
- Mouth
- Esophagus
- Stomach
- Small intestine and
- Large intestine
The very interesting operation goes on in our body when we force our digestive system in taking any foodstuff as well. When we eat something and start chewing inside our mouth, then our mouth releases a kind of saliva that we call mouth water.
This important digestive saliva contains enzymes that helps break down the starched stuff in foods. As a result, the foods we take become softened and liquid to swallow easy.
However, when you get swallowed down your foods, it falls into esophagus. It is a pipe that connects our mouth to our stomach. And a muscular entrance that we know as a lower esophageal sphincter gets opened to let the foods move into our stomach.
Then the existing acids in our stomach again breaks down our foods in pieces. In this process it produces a mushy of gastric juices and digests foods partially that we call chime. Therefore, after this process is done, then the mixture of foods move into our small intestine.
Interestingly, in our small intestine, our pancreas and liver provide their effective digestive liquid to the mixture from stomach. Here, the pancreatic juices work well in breaking down the fats, carbohydrates and protein to get easier the digestive process.
And the foods value such as proteins, vitamins, water and other nutrients go into our bloodstream to circulate for whole body. The rest of the indigestive foods slip away into our large intestine. And here, the large intestine absorbs the rest of the nutrients from the remains and leaves them as wastages and remove through our stool.
However, the final talk is that the time of your digestion depends on the foods you take. This is why, there is no exact answer of how long does it take to digest food.