∞ generated and posted on 2016.02.27 ∞
Means by which nutrients and energy are taken up into animal bodies.
| The task of the Digestive System is to take food into the body, to prepare that food for digestion, to chemically digest the food, and then to absorb the resulting digestive breakdown products into the body tissues, particularly into blood and lymph and from there to be circulated to the rest of the body. |
…like every other creature on earth, humans take part in a food chain, and our place in that food chain, or food web, determines to a considerable extent what kind of creature we are. The fact of our omnivorousness has done much to shape our nature, both body (we possess the omnicompetent teeth and jaws of the omnivore, equally well suited to tearing meat and grinding seeds) and soul. Our prodigious powers of observation and memory, as well as our curious and experimental stance towards the natural world, owe much to the biological fact of omnivorousness. So do the various adaptations we've evolved to defeat the defenses of other creatures so that we might eat them, including our skills at hunting and cooking with fire. Some philosophers have argued that the very open-endedness of human appetite is responsible for both our savagery and civility, since a creature that could conceive of eating anything (including, notably, other humans) stands in particular need of ethical rules, manners, and rituals. We are not only what we eat, but how we eat, too. — Michael Pollan, 2006, from The Omnivore's Dilemma, p. 6
The above video is an excellent as well as very short introduction to the basics of digestion and the digestive system.
The above video is the first of a three part introduction to the digestive system.
The above video is the second of a three part introduction to the digestive system.
The above video is the third of a three part introduction to the digestive system.
The above video is a crude but short and informative overview; the narrator, though, sounds a bit like HAL from the movie, "2001".
The above video consists of a walk through the gross anatomy of the digestive system based upon models. This basically is an aspect of the material that you would be learning in an anatomy course.