Digestion and metabolism
From the mouth to the anus, every bite of food has a journey of about six metres ahead. Meat, vegetables and bread will be worked over with juices and acids, and broken down into their various components. What the body can use will go into the blood, be filtered through the liver and then spread through the body via the blood. A network of hormones regulates what happens with the nutrients. Usually we do not even notice. We usually first become aware of the functions of digestion and the metabolism when they do not work as they should.
Feature: Irritable bowel syndrome
IBS is a common bowel problem. Other names for it include irritable colon, mucus or spastic colitis and nervous stomach. The symptoms are gut pain, constipation and/or diarrhoea. It’s not dangerous, but the symptoms can be very painful. Find out all about this little-understood disease and what you can try for relief in our Fact Sheet.
Feature: Preventing bowel cancer
There is no shortage of recommendations about how to prevent bowel cancer: more fibre, less meat, vitamin supplements and even medicines feature in the long list of suggestions that have been propagated for years. We have studied the latest evidence to see how much scientific support there now is for these common recommendations.
