Before we dive into all the nitty-gritty details about the digestive system, we just want to note that as food passes through the alimentary canal, we're going to call it different things, and you're going to want to be familiar with the names that we call it, so that you know what we're talking about. Alright. So we're just going to start by saying that as food moves through the GI tract, we call it different names, and you see those three different names here. We can call it a bolus. We call it chyme, or we call it feces, and it just depends on where it is in the digestive tract. So to help us out here, we have this sort of stylized image of the digestive tract here, but we've added in 3 places. We can see this food passing through it. Alright.
So first, let's define a bolus. A bolus is going to be the lump of chewed food mixed with saliva, and you can see that in the digestive tract here being swallowed in the esophagus. And usually, when we're talking about a bolus, we're talking about it going down the esophagus. So it's going to be found in the mouth and the esophagus, and it really just is that ball, or lump of food. Now the word bolus is actually derived from a root word that means something like a pill. But the way I remember it is that bolus kind of sounds like the word ball, and a bolus is that ball of food that you swallow. Alright. But that ball of food goes down the esophagus, then it reaches the stomach, and it gets all broken up and mixed with the stomach acid and whatnot. And then we are going to call it chyme. So chyme, that’s the slime that's in your stomach. The chyme is going to be the partially digested food mixed with gastric juices, and then it's going to stay chyme as it passes out of the stomach into the small intestine and get mixed with more juices like pancreatic juices, bile, and intestinal juices. So here we said it’s going to be found in the stomach and the small intestine. And in our drawing here, we can see this green slime in the stomach. There’s green slime in the small intestine. That’s the kind. Alright.
Once it passes out of the small intestine, we give it another name. Now we're going to call it feces. And feces, well, that's just another name for poop. Right? So feces is going to be this fully digested waste product. Basically, anything your body couldn't absorb just is going to pass through, and your large intestine is going to remove a lot of water, so it’s going to have low water content. And so we're going to find that feces in the large intestine or colon, and we can see that in our image right there. Alright. So be familiar with those names going forward because we’re going to use them, and I'll see you there.
