What Happens to a Hamburger

What Happens to a Hamburger

I like to eat. I like bread and pears and celery. I like carrots and chicken and french fries and hamburgers. I like juice and milk. What do you like?

Good food makes you strong and healthy. It gives you energy and helps you grow. Your body uses food in different ways. It uses some kinds of food to make strong bones and hard teeth. It turns other food into solid muscles. It uses some of the food you eat to keep warm. Before your body can do these things, it has to change the food. Solid foods like hamburgers and french fries have to be changed into liquids, Liquids like milk and juice have to be changed, too. When you change the food you eat, you are digesting it.

Put two cubes of sugar into an empty glass. Take a wooden spoon and pound the lumps with the handle. Pound them until they are broken up into powder. Now pour some water into the glass and stir, Keep stirring until the sugar powder has disappeared. Take a sip of the water, Can you taste the sugar? The sugar has disappeared, but it is still there. It has broken up into millions of tiny pieces. Your eye cannot see them, but your tongue can taste them.

When you digest your food, you break it up into millions of very tiny pieces. You start to do this as soon as you take a bite to eat. Digestion begins in your mouth when you chew. You break up the food with your teeth. Get a piece of raw carrot and a plate. Take a bite of carrot and chew it ten times. Spit the carrot out onto one side of the plate. Take another bite. Chew it thirty times. Spit out that mouthful on the other side of the plate. Can you see the difference? The longer you chew food, the smaller the pieces will be.

Something else helps to break up the food in your mouth. It is a fluid. Many people call it spit, Its scientific name is saliva. Whenever you take a bite of food, saliva pours into your mouth. You say your mouth is watering. Saliva comes from small glands in your cheeks and under your tongue. Sometimes saliva pours into your mouth even before you take a bite. The smell of food will start it. Take a good sniff of a brownie. Sniff an open jar of pickles. Now sniff a slice of pizza. What other kinds of food make your mouth water?