The digestive tract is the long, winding pathway inside your body that food travels through from the moment you swallow it until what's left comes out as waste. Think of it as a processing tunnel that starts at your mouth and ends at your anus, with several important stops along the way.

When you eat a sandwich, it enters your digestive tract at your mouth, where your teeth break it down and mix it with saliva. Then it slides down your esophagus (the tube connecting your mouth to your stomach), spends time getting churned and dissolved by your stomach acids, and moves into your small intestine, where most of the nutrients get absorbed into your bloodstream. What remains continues to your large intestine, where water gets removed, and finally the waste exits your body.

The entire tract is actually one continuous tube, about 30 feet long if you stretched it out, though it's coiled and folded to fit inside you. Different sections have different jobs: breaking food into smaller pieces, mixing it with digestive juices, extracting nutrients your body needs, and eliminating what it doesn't. Scientists and doctors also call it the gastrointestinal tract or GI tract for short. When someone has an upset stomach or food poisoning, they have a problem somewhere in their digestive tract.