Large Intestine - 20 Interesting facts

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1. Large intestine forms the final segment where the body makes the last attempt to extract all nutrients from the food eaten. Anything that cannot be used by the body is essentially pushed out of the body by the large intestine. You know what? We call that waste product as stool or poop! Isn’t that – eww?

2. Large intestine, over the entire lifetime of a person, actually ends up processing around 50 tons of food consumed by an individual. It may be more or less depending on how much a person eats.

3. Of course, large intestine is the last place where the body tries to extract the remaining nutrients from the consumed food but you know what? This organ is actually expendable. This means that it can be removed completely from the body and yet a person can actually survive.

4. The large intestine may be removed from the body either because of cancer or because of some kind of injury that prevents it from functioning properly and thus, in return, the defective organ creates problems for the rest of the body.

5. The question is, ‘what will happen if the body needs to survive without the large intestine?’ This is an interesting question because one may argue that if it was really expendable and unnecessary then why the hell was it placed inside the body in the first place? Well, the large intestine is actually responsible for keeping the body hydrated.

6. It so happens that when someone consumes some food, the water content of the body gets absorbed in the large intestine and then in return, the body is hydrated by the organ.

7. So, once the organ is completely removed, the source of hydration is lost. In that case, a person needs to resort to more frequent drinking of water in order to avoid getting dehydrated. This means that the overall survival mechanism for the person without a large intestine has to be overhauled.

8. The large intestine isn’t really that large you know! The ‘large’ part of the name actually comes from its width and not its length. In fact, this organ is actually way shorter than the small intestine.

9. Just how much shorter is it? Well, the large intestine is actually 25% of the average length of the small intestine. Put in simpler words, the large intestine is just 1/4th of the length of small intestine.

10. Though smaller than small intestine, it is way thicker than the other. However, despite the differences in thickness, the large intestine works pretty much the same way the small intestine works.

11. Inside the large intestine the food is propelled forwards using special muscle movements. In the process, the nutrients and the water content of the food is extracted.

12. According to medical experts, the muscles in the large intestine are so strong that they can act against gravity without any problem.

13. The large intestine acts as a warehouse when needed. This means that it works as a storage. Really weird right? Well, there may be times when the organ just needs additional time to extract all nutrients and water from food we eat. This can take up to 2 days and large intestine is wide enough to accommodate previous and current food for 2 days or more when needed.

14. Every one of us (babies, old people, young, adults, male and females – just everyone) experiences flatulence. Did you ever think where exactly this gas is formed? The gas production site is basically the large intestine.

15. The large intestine is the home for quite a number of microbes, especially bacteria. These microbes are very very fond of breaking down the food in the large intestine. Some bacteria even survive the whole of digestive procedure inside our body and eventually end up fermenting the food inside the large intestine.

16. This fermentation of food leads to gas buildup and eventually turns into flatulence. In most cases however, the body is capable of dealing with the gas buildup, which is expelled out from the anus within an hour or two.

17. The large intestine is the site where leftover indigestible useless food is converted into feces, which is then expelled out of the body through the anus.

18. We said that there are several microbes that live inside the large intestine. How many of them? Actually there are more than 500 different species of microbes that thrive inside the large intestine and are responsible for synthesizing a good number of useful products that the body needs for survival.

19. This 1.5 meters or 5 feet long (on an average) organ has been divided into 6 parts – the cecum where the large intestine and the small intestine connect together, the ascending colon, the transverse colon or the slanting colon, the descending colon, the sigmoid colon and finally the rectum.

20. The large intestine forms an inverted U shape. The sigmoid colon part of the organ is where the solid feces is store before it is excreted. The reason the waste is solid is because the organ actually absorbs all the water out of the food and converts it into solid waste.

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