The biology of your digestive system
Before we start talking about bottoms and bowels, it helps if you have a basic understanding of your digestive system and what happens when it is working normally.
When food is eaten it is chewed and mixed with saliva to start off the digestive process before it leaves the mouth and travels down the oesophagus (food pipe) and into the stomach.
In the stomach it is churned some more and mixed with digestive juices to that it is broken down into a semi-liquid consistency, before entering the small bowel (small intestine).
The small bowel sits in a tight bundle of loops and coils right in the middle of your belly. It is essentially like a very long tube in which all the nutrients from the liquefied food are digested to break them down into the tiniest particles with the help of more digestive juices, so they can be absorbed into the body. The waste products – what is left over from this process - then continue into the large bowel (colon) which is a wider, shorter tube.
The large bowel consists of several parts, travelling upwards on the right hand side of the belly, across the middle and back down on the left hand side before it bends inwards and backwards towards the back passage, (rectum) and anus.
The shape of the large bowel (large intestine), allows the water from the waste material to be gradually absorbed back into the body, and the waste material becomes the more familiar soft faeces (poo/stools). As it travels along the large bowel, these faeces gradually become more solid, before they eventually reach the rectum (back passage). There are a series of little “gates” (valves) in the rectum which help to hold the faeces (poo/stools) in place and the anus – the big sphincter muscle that is the opening through the bottom and into the bowel - holds everything tightly closed until you are ready to empty your bowel (go to the toilet). When the rectum is full, messages are sent to the brain via the nervous system and you get the sensation that you need to go to the toilet. Usually a gentle push down into the bottom allows the faeces (poo/stools) to pass through the anus and out of the body.
