From Nose to Tail: Into the Intestines

From Nose to Tail: Into the Intestines: In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Julie continue to follow the journey of a haggis through the digestive system of man. Listen in as the small intestines absorb all sorts of vital nutrients from your liquefied food.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to stuff to bowl your mind.
My name is Robert Lamb, and we are continuing our
journey from nose to tail, from snout the sphincter, from

(00:23):
tongue to taint. I don't know, I'm running. That's great.
It's pretty good too. Yeah. So anyway, we are continuing
this epic journey through the digestive system. We began at
the nose really at the beginning of sensing the things
that you might eat, and we continued on through chewing.
We talked about swallowing, about the forming of the bullus,

(00:45):
we talked about the stomach, and I believe that's where
we left up. Yeah, yeah, when we last last left
the cime. That's that's what the bullets became, was lulling
around in digestive juices. Um. These digestive juices rich and
ensign and acids with the pH level of two, which
is just one above the acids in the stomach of

(01:06):
a vulture. By the way, uh so, yeah, the result
was a thick, creamy substance which we do call clime.
So if you think of this digestive journey as a
ride at a theme park, then you can kind of
think about this next part of the ride. Um through
the small intestine is the point in the theme park

(01:27):
where you start to queue up that long line. So
we're we're up at the top of the peak right
about the we're just slowly reaching the edge and then
we're gonna tip over and it's just gonna be this
epic ride all the way out, yes, and we are
about to slide into the intestines. And it's me quite
a ride because, as Mary Rich describes, the intestines and
gulp of the walls are bologny, pink and lush with

(01:51):
mucostal folds. These are circular folds that help regulate the
flow of digestive food. And then the whole shebang is
covered in alimeter along projections called villa, which are kind
of like tiny little fingers sticking out um and she
actually likens it to little loops on terry cloth, which
I thought was a good description. They helped to increase

(02:12):
the surface area that the food passes through, and they
are also covered with another type of villai called microvilli.
So you have a ton of surface area here and
we always you know, hear about when you're you're in
school about the small intestine being sort of an ironic
name for it because it's not so small, right right,
It's it's pretty big. In fact, if you were to
take it stretch it all out. Don't do this because

(02:33):
it's really hard to put it all back once you're done.
But if you were to take your small intestines out
and stretch it out flat, just flatten it down, it
would cover a tennis court, an entire tennis court. The
Williams sisters could take on another opposing team I don't
know enough about tennis to fill that team on an
antic Cornicovi and Pete Sampras why not uh, And they

(02:54):
could play on the surface of your intestines the entire game.
They'd have to get used to it because you know,
presumably that micro villa I would really be sticking to
the soles of their shoes. Well, I mean, if we
spread it out, then I'm thinking we get a smooth surface,
we get rid of those ripples, We're gonna iron out
this intestinal tissue. I don't know. I think you'd have
to treat that small intestine tennis court. Probably they're gonna
have to wear special shoes or maybe go barefooted, but

(03:18):
that might be a little weird for them. Oh man,
can you imagine the sounds that would make, Like can
you imagine watching Wimbledon and hearing the squishing and then
the grunting, right, because some of the players grunt. But anyway,
we get into an entirely different territory when we start
talking about grunting, and we talked about the intestines um,
that just kind of gives you a good light of
the land, like what does this actually look like inside

(03:40):
of your body? And it's But the thing is one
of the things about the small intestines and the colon
which if you're just here, you're just tuning in to this,
this is these are the final two steps in our journey.
We're gonna do this episode and then we're gonna do
an episode on the colon um. So we're almost there.
We're almost to the Promised Land. But the thing is
that so many people don't want to think past the stomach.

(04:02):
You know, it's kind of like, oh, I ate some
delicious food, it's in my tummy. Now my tummy is
where stuff happens, and then everything else don't want to
hear about it don't want to know. Well, that's because
a small intestine in the colon are kind of where
the sausage making happens. And nobody likes to think about
sausage making, right, Yes, political or actual sausage making. Right.
This is where I mean in a sense, this is

(04:24):
where gross things are continuing to happen. It's it's the
final journey in which the things that we ate, uh
look less and less like what we consumed and more
and more like the poop that's going to come out
at the end. Yeah, And on this journey right now,
as he said, we've got that ball of crime and
now it's queuing up at the pyloric valve. This is
a portal into the first section of your small intestine.

(04:47):
Now remember that this first of all this time formerly
was Haggis, right, and now it's strip by saying it
was Haggis and it remains yes, And through a process
called peristalsis is being pushed through now from the pyloric
valve into the small intestine. Only a little bit at
a time, though, because the remaining parts continues to get

(05:08):
broken down until it's just the right consistency where it
can get pushed through um the kind that boards the duodenum.
This is the first part of the small intestine gets
hosed with bile which is discharged through the gall bladder,
the liver and the pancreas through ducks that lead to
the small intestine. All right, biling it up, Yeah, biling
it up, getting hosed. The reason for this is that

(05:30):
it's going to get broken down even further into nutrients
in the form of food molecules. And also there's just
there are also some enzymes from the pancreas in there
as well, happing to break things down because again it
continues to be a matter of we have consumed food,
we have consumed energy and food form, and the whole
trip through it has to be broken down, has to
be taken apart, it has to be disassembled. It's like

(05:52):
a it's like a chrysler that has been taken to
a chop shop and by the end of it, there's
gonna be nothing left but an empty shell out on
sin are blocks. Yeah, and you've got a couple of accomplices, right,
and you've got you know, with the liver, the gall bladder,
and the pancreas adding their own little chopping to this.
Chunk shop. Then this kind, this this haggis moves into

(06:13):
the jenna junum, and this is the middle section of
the small intestine that carries food through really rapidly with
wave like muscle contractions towards the ilium. Ilium is the
last section and is the longest part of your small intestine.
It is where most of the nutrients from your food
are absorbed before getting emptied into the colon. This is

(06:33):
really important because this process accounts for the absorption of
of the nutrients in your food that happens here in
the small intestine. Yeah. So so again, when when we
say that it's an important part of the process, it's
it's really, in a sense of the most important process.
This is where the energy absorption is really taking place.
This is where the money is being made for your body.

(06:56):
And and it's also going to be important later on
in some strange things we're going to discuss in the
colon section. It's true they are going to be a
little bit strange um, but completely normal in some ways. No, no, no, normal.
But I'm just saying, well, it'll all makes sense in
the end, but literally, but but yeah, just keep in
mind that the upper intestines. This is where the important

(07:20):
stuff is happening. This is where the nutrients are being
absorbed for the most part. And I really dig this
idea of these blood vessels and the walls of the
intestine scooping out those food molecules, those nutrients, and then
delivering them to the rest of body, because if you
look at pictures of this, it's sort of alien like
the way that these are coursing through the walls and
the intestines sucking that out. Um. But yeah, they are

(07:42):
carried up through the portal vein into the liver for
further processing and storage. So again you have other parts
of the body that are getting in on this and
also important here getting in on the filtration system, getting
on some more on their removing of toxins and other
bad stuff from what you ate. Indeed, they're continue to be,
you know, since you can continue to be police present

(08:03):
throughout the digestive process to weed out some of the
bad eggs. All right, So we're gonna take a quick
break and when we come back, we're gonna talk a
little more about the small intestines, about wind it's important
what it's doing, and some of the really crazy kind
of stuff that we've discovered about in recent years. All right,

(08:27):
we're back, we are, and we're talking about the small intestines.
We're talking about the the upper stories of your intestinal area.
This uh often UM ignored, often um excluded portion of
the human anatomy. We don't necessarily want to think about
what's going on there, but especially the upper intestines, vital
things are