Your digestive (say: dye-jes-tiv) system started working even before you took the first bite of your pizza. And the digestive system will be busy at work on your chewed-up lunch for the next few hours — or sometimes days, depending upon what you've eaten. This process, called digestion, allows your body to get the nutrients and energy it needs from the food you eat. So let's find out what's happening to that pizza, orange, and milk.
Even before you eat, when you smell a tasty food, see it, or think about it, digestion begins. Saliva (say: suh-lye-vuh), or spit, begins to form in your mouth.
When you do eat, the saliva breaks down the chemicals in the food a bit, which helps make the food mushy and easy to swallow. Your tongue helps out, pushing the food around while you chew with your teeth. When you're ready to swallow, the tongue pushes a tiny bit of mushed-up food called a bolus (say: bow-lus) toward the back of your throat and into the opening of your esophagus, the second part of the digestive tract.
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