Medicine’s Marissa Scavuzzo shares the importance of digestion

Unpicking the mystery of the body’s ‘second brain’

WiredMarissa Scavuzzo, a postdoctoral fellow at the School of Medicine, explained how, from the moment you swallow a bite of food to the moment it exits your body, your gut is toiling to process this strange outside material. It has to break chunks down into small bits. “Digestion is required for survival,” she said. “We do it every day, but also, if you really think about it, it sounds very foreign and alien.”