Find out how food is broken down

When you smell a tasty food

, see it, or think about it, digestion begins. Your mouth starts to get watery. When you do eat, the water breaks down the chemicals in the food a bit, which helps make the food easy to swallow. Your tongue helps out, pushing the food around while you chew with your teeth. When you're ready to swallow, the tongue pushes a tiny bit of food called a bolus toward the back of your throat and into the opening of your oesophagus, the second part of the digestive tract.
On the Way Down The oesophagus is like a stretchy pipe that's about 18 inches long. It moves food from the back of your throat to your stomach. But also at the back of your throat is your windpipe, which allows air to come in and out of your body. When you swallow a small amount of food or liquids, a special flap called the epiglottis flops down over the opening of your windpipe to make sure the food enters the oesophagus and not the windpipe. If you've ever drunk something too fast and started to cough, and heard someone say that your drink "went down the wrong way," the person meant that it went down your windpipe by mistake. This happens when the epiglottis doesn't have enough time to flop down, and you cough without thinking about it to clear your windpipe. Once food has entered the oesophagus, it doesn't just drop right into your stomach. Instead, muscles in the walls of the oesophagus move in a wavy way to slowly squeeze the food through the oesophagus. This takes about 5 seconds.
Your stomach, which is attached to the end of the oesophagus, is a stretchy sack shaped like the letter J. It has three important jobs:
To store the food you've eaten
To break down the food into a liquid mixture
To slowly empty that liquid mixture into the small intestine
The stomach is like a mixer, churning and mashing together all the small pieces of food that came down the oesophagus into smaller and smaller pieces. It does this with help from the strong muscles in the walls of the stomach and gastric juices that also come from the stomach's walls. In addition to breaking down food, gastric juices also help kill bacteria that might be in the eaten food.

This is how food is broken down. to put it shortly, food is broken down through digestion.