Dr. Trisha Pasricha

pushing and contracting, contracting and relaxing to push that food along.

And it's gonna start in the esophagus, that's gonna continue in different forms all the way until it reaches the exit hatch.

So it goes from the esophagus down into the stomach.

It's going to become promptly acidified.

and your stomach is gonna start to grind up that meal.

Now, the protein is gonna be a little bit harder for it to break down, the meat of that bun.

The fiber, even though it's a small amount of fiber, that too is gonna take a little bit longer.

The bun, the french fries, those are gonna pass a little bit more quickly into the small bowel.

Once things move into the small bowel, they're very small pieces, you're going to start to absorb the nutrients and all of the good stuff, whatever there is in this burger and fries that your body wants to have.

And that's going to get absorbed.

And whatever you can't absorb by design, and largely that's going to be the fiber in this case, what you can't absorb is going to keep on moving.

Maybe you have seeds on that bun.

Maybe the seeds are going to keep on moving.

And as it does, eventually it'll go from the small bowel through a part of the bowel called the ileocecal valve, and it'll push itself into the colon.

And here's where something kind of magical happens.

Your colon is filled with trillions of bacteria, right?

And those bacteria plus the genetic material that they contain, that's called the microbiome.

And the microbiome is going to take what's reached that area and they're going to feed upon it.

They're going to ferment it.

And then they're going to produce these, what hopefully is a beneficial short-chain fatty acid or other compounds that even though the original material, the fiber itself can't be absorbed, what they produce as a result of what you fed them, that can make it into the bloodstream and it can have these local effects right there on the colon.