This is something that has always puzzled me.
How does your body understands that these minuscule substances (like spices or seeds) aren’t liquid but instead considered food, and, how does it manages to sort out everything when your stomach has a bunch of things on it at the same time?
In: Biology
Solid and liquid food/drink enter the body through the mouth and are chewed into a fairly smooth mixture there. From the mouth they pass down to the stomach, where a combination of acids, enzymes, and physical churning breaks the food down further, both chemically and physically. From the stomach, the food enters the small intestine. A bit of further chemical breakdown happens here, and nutrients are absorbed from the food into the blood through the walls of the intestine. From the small intestine the remaining unabsorbed and indigestible parts (fiber, seeds, etc), as well as the water enters the large intestine. The large intestine absorbs most of the water, passing it into the blood, and the remainder is passed out as feces.
Meanwhile, your kidneys are filtering your blood to eliminate wastes produced by your cells and to maintain your blood at the right level of saltiness. As they filter, they excrete water filled with wastes and salt, which goes to the bladder for storage and is then excreted as urine.
TL;DR…there’s not a single step where everything gets sorted, it’s more like an assembly line where different parts of the food get absorbed (or not) at different stages. And urine production happens off on a separate assembly line.
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