What type of food stays in the stomach the longest

For healthy adults, digestion of food usually takes between 24 and 72 hours. After you eat, it takes about six to eight hours for food to pass through your stomach and small intestine. Food then enters your large intestine colon for further digestion and absorption of water.

Acids in your stomach break down the food even more. This produces a mushy mixture of gastric juices and partially digested food, called chyme. This mixture moves on to your small intestine. In your small intestine, your pancreas and liver contribute their own digestive juices to the mix. Pancreatic juices break down carbohydrates, fats, and proteins.

Bile from your gallbladder dissolves fat. Vitamins, other nutrients, and water move through the walls of your small intestine into your bloodstream. The undigested part that remains moves on to your large intestine.

The large intestine absorbs any remaining water and leftover nutrients from the food. The rest becomes solid waste, called stool. Certain conditions can disrupt digestion and leave you with some unpleasant side effects like heartburn, gas, constipation, or diarrhea.

Here are a few:. To keep food moving smoothly through your digestive system and prevent issues like diarrhea and constipation, try these tips:. Vegetables, fruits, and whole grains are all rich sources of fiber. Fiber helps food move through your digestive system more easily and completely.

Studies show red meat produces chemicals that are linked to heart disease. These beneficial bacteria help crowd out the harmful bugs in your digestive tract. Moving your body keeps your digestive tract moving, too. Although a minimal amount of carbohydrate digestion occurs in the mouth, chemical digestion really gets underway in the stomach.

An expansion of the alimentary canal that lies immediately inferior to the esophagus, the stomach links the esophagus to the first part of the small intestine the duodenum and is relatively fixed in place at its esophageal and duodenal ends. In between, however, it can be a highly active structure, contracting and continually changing position and size.

These contractions provide mechanical assistance to digestion. The empty stomach is only about the size of your fist, but can stretch to hold as much as 4 liters of food and fluid, or more than 75 times its empty volume, and then return to its resting size when empty. Rather, when you eat greater quantities of food—such as at holiday dinner—you stretch the stomach more than when you eat less. Popular culture tends to refer to the stomach as the location where all digestion takes place.

Of course, this is not true. An important function of the stomach is to serve as a temporary holding chamber. You can ingest a meal far more quickly than it can be digested and absorbed by the small intestine. Thus, the stomach holds food and parses only small amounts into the small intestine at a time. Foods are not processed in the order they are eaten; rather, they are mixed together with digestive juices in the stomach until they are converted into chyme, which is released into the small intestine.

As you will see in the sections that follow, the stomach plays several important roles in chemical digestion, including the continued digestion of carbohydrates and the initial digestion of proteins and triglycerides.

Little if any nutrient absorption occurs in the stomach, with the exception of the negligible amount of nutrients in alcohol. There are four main regions in the stomach: the cardia, fundus, body, and pylorus. The cardia or cardiac region is the point where the esophagus connects to the stomach and through which food passes into the stomach. Located inferior to the diaphragm, above and to the left of the cardia, is the dome-shaped fundus.

Below the fundus is the body, the main part of the stomach. The funnel-shaped pylorus connects the stomach to the duodenum.

The wider end of the funnel, the pyloric antrum, connects to the body of the stomach. The narrower end is called the pyloric canal, which connects to the duodenum. The smooth muscle pyloric sphincter is located at this latter point of connection and controls stomach emptying. Stomach acid also plays an important role in preventing food-borne illness as it kills any bacteria or viruses that may have been present in the food.

Nutrients and water that have been removed from the digested food pass through the walls of the small intestine. They enter the bloodstream and travel to various areas of the body where they are used to repair and build. The unabsorbed and undigested food that remains then moves to the large intestine. Here, some more nutrients and water are absorbed. The remainder is stored in the rectum until it leaves the body through a bowel movement. To enjoy a healthy digestive system and to prevent constipation and diarrhea , try the following:.

Fiber-rich foods, including fruits, vegetables, legumes, and whole grains, help move food through the digestive system more rapidly. They also help prevent constipation, feed gut bacteria, and help with weight loss.

Processed and fast foods are often high in fat, making them difficult to digest. They are also rich in sugar, which may upset the balance of bacteria in the gut. These types of food also contain additives that can cause stomach upset in some people and contribute to poor health.

Drinking enough water and other liquids, such as teas and juices, can prevent constipation and keep food moving through the digestive system.

Probiotics are beneficial bacteria that help restore the balance of bacteria in the body by reducing the growth of harmful bacteria in the gut. The following foods are rich in probiotics:. Make sure to include fiber-rich and prebiotic-rich foods to feed the probiotics you ingest as well as the healthy bacteria already in your colon. Engaging in daily exercise benefits the digestive tract, as well as the rest of the body.

Some people find that a gentle walk after meals reduces bloating, gas, and constipation. Being stressed can slow down digestion and contribute to symptoms such as heartburn , cramping and bloating.