The gastrointestinal system: a piece of cake.

PHYSIOLOGY TEACHING often comprises of a large percentage of didactic lectures. A 1-h didactic lecture is often much longer than the average attention span of most students (2). It is preferable to use different methods to decrease the possible monotony of the didactic lecture (1). This is even more important when the topic being discussed has a greater number of facts that require memorizing. In this article, we describe a simple activity that can be used to enliven didactic teaching of the gastrointestinal system. This involved baking a cake and looking in detail at the ingredients of the cake and the different physiological processes that take place in the body as a piece of cake courses through the gastrointestinal tract.