See You in the Stomach
Your stomach is attached to the end of the esophagus. It's a stretchy sack shaped like the letter J. It has three important jobs:

• to store the food you've eaten
• to break down the food into a liquidy mixture
• to slowly empty that liquidy mixture into the small intestine

The stomach is like a mixer, churning and mashing together all the small balls of food that came down the esophagus into smaller and smaller pieces. It does this with help from the strong muscles in the walls of the stomach and gastric (say: gas-trik) juices that also come from the stomach's walls. In addition to breaking down food, gastric juices also help kill bacteria that might be in the eaten food.

Onward to the small intestine!

22 Feet Isn't Small at All
The small intestine (say: in-tes-tin) is a long tube that's about 1 1/2 inches to 2 inches (about 3.5 to 5 centimeters) around, and it's packed inside you beneath your stomach. If you stretched out an adult's small intestine, it would be about 22 feet long (6.7 meters) - that's like 22 notebooks lined up end to end, all in a row!

The small intestine breaks down the food mixture even more so your body can absorb all the vitamins, minerals, proteins, carbohydrates, and fats. The chicken on your pizza is full of proteins - and a little fat - and the small intestine can help extract them - with a little help from three friends: the pancreas (say: pan-kree-us), liver, and gallbladder.

Those organs send different juices to the first part of the small intestine. These juices help to digest food and allow the body to absorb nutrients. The pancreas makes juices that help the body digest fats and protein. A juice from the liver called bile helps to absorb fats into the bloodstream. And the gallbladder serves as a warehouse for bile, storing it until the body needs it.

Your food may spend as long as 4 hours in the small intestine and will become a very thin, watery mixture. It's time well spent because, at the end of the journey, the nutrients from your pizza, orange, and milk can pass from the intestine into the blood. Once in the blood, your body is closer to benefiting from the complex carbohydrates in the pizza crust, the vitamin C in your orange, the protein in the chicken, and the calcium in your milk.

Next stop for these nutrients: the liver! And the leftover waste - remnants of the food that your body can't use - goes on to the large intestine.