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Chapter

How Foods Impact Your Physical Performance

Food. It’s essential to human life. The average person eats about 1,500 pounds of it every single year, including about 150 pounds of meat, nearly 300 pounds of milk and cream, 120 pounds of potatoes, and 80 pounds of fruit. Even so, it’s all too easy to underestimate the all-important role that food plays in helping us enjoy life to the fullest. How Foods Give Your Body Energy To understand how food gives the body energy, it’s important to know a bit about how your body works. As soon as you put a bite of food in your mouth, the digestive process starts. Your teeth break food down into small pieces, and an enzyme in your saliva starts breaking down food starches to enable digestion. When you swallow, the food goes down your esophagus and into your stomach. Once the stomach has completed its part of the digestive process, the food moves into the small intestine. The complete breakdown of most foods happens in the small intestine, after which the food molecules are absorbed into the

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