How digestion works: what happens to food after you eat it
Fibre and gut bacteria: what happens to the food you cannot digest
About 38 trillion bacteria live in your gut, roughly as many as the cells of your own body. They eat much of the part of your food that you cannot digest, and they give something back. What do they make from your leftovers?
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Saturday evening, at the end of moving day. The fibre of your beans has gone through the whole small intestine, and nothing could cut it. Now it reaches the last part of the tube: the large intestine.
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Here lives a crowd: about 38 trillion bacteria. That is about as many as all the cells of your own body, and almost all of them live here, in the last part of the tube.
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