A closer look
Flattening out all the microscopic folds, villi, and microvilli in an average adult human's small intestine would create a surface area roughly the size of a professional tennis court, meaning your body has somehow managed to pack an entire grass-court playing field of highly absorptive digestive tissue into your abdominal cavity just to extract the nutritional value from a microwave burrito, an architectural masterpiece of biological origami that exists entirely to ensure every last drop of glucose makes it into your bloodstream, which is incredibly impressive until you realize it takes all that surface area just to poorly process the sheer volume of refined carbohydrates we consume daily, making it simultaneously awe-inspiring and deeply tragic that we possess a marvel of internal engineering optimized for peak nutrient extraction, yet we primarily use it to absorb the artificial food coloring from budget-friendly sports drinks on a Saturday morning hangover
