Digestive System Lab

Digestive Organ	Length (cm)
Mouth	9.7 cm
Esophagus	42 cm
Stomach	19 cm
Small Intestine	721.36 cm
Large Intestine	180.34 cm
TOTAL	972.4 cm

For this activity, we measured the approximate lengths of each of the organs in our digestive system. For the mouth, we measured from our jaw to the front of our mouth. the esophagus was measured by going from our jaw to the end of our rib cage. The stomach was approximated by taking the length of the space between the thumb and pinky when the hand was stretched out. For the small intestine, we had to convert our height into centimeters and then multiply by 4. Lastly, the large intestine length was found my just taking our height in centimeters. This was an interesting way to figure out how long each organ was. The total length of my digestive system is almost 5 1/2 times the size of my height. This is a serious difference and it is amazing to think that all it would be able to fit in my body just by wrapping and coiling around. I would guess that, on average, it would take about 18 hours for food to move through my entire digestive system. In looking it up, the actual time is 24-72 hours. This makes sense considering people don't defecate every day, as my prediction would suggest. Some factors that may influence the time that it takes to pass through the whole digestive system are that the stomach needs time to break down the food, the bolus has to wind around 9 meters of organs, and in the process, many nutrients and other things are extracted from it on the way. Many muscles are used in this process to make the food used to its full potential. Digestion is different from absorption because digestion is the process of breaking down the food whereas absorption is taking in or soaking up substances or energy. The stomach and the small intestine are involved in the process of digestion, and the large intestine is involved mainly with the absorption aspect. The small intestine does help with absorption as well as digestion.