Glucose

It’s been a while… Hello people! School has been strenuous but we are moving through.. How are you?! Hope you are nice

I read something this morning, still physiology. You should know already this is my favorite course 😂. Digestion of carbohydrates. Honestly I had read this in biology in secondary school a gazillion times and it still fascinated me. This morning I got a little more in depth and decided to share.

Whenever you take a spoon of rice or you chewing on that potato. Ever wondered what actually happens to it in the body. Let’s find out. The whole process begin when we boil our rice or fry our French fries. The reason for cooking is the break down the part of the food we can’t digest called cellulose. Cellolose is usually found in non animal food (plants). Once it’s broken down we can access the other nutrients in the food. Now the food is ready and we put a spoon in mouth. Immediately saliva is produced in large amounts (how that is done is a topic for another day) the saliva has a lot of constituents but the one needed right now is called ptylain : alpha amylase. This acts on the food for the few seconds while it’s in your mouth(about 5% of your food is digested in your mouth) down to the fundus of the stomach. It takes about an hour for the food to mix with the gastric juice,once the gastric juice mixes with it the action of ptylain stops because the enzyme(a substance that makes a reaction go faster that usual) becomes inactive at a ph of 4 and the ph of the stomach is about 2.0 -3.0. Once the food leaves the stomach into the duodenum (small intestine) it changes its name to chyme. The chyme is acted upon by pancreatic amylase. It has the same function has ptylain but it is way more powerful within 15-30 on arrival the whole of the chyme becomes digested

At this point. The digested food needs to be hydrolyzed(breaking them down to their simplest form that can be absorbed) . The small intestine has villi and microvilli with a brush border(hair like border) which secretes enzymes known as lactase which works on lactose, maltase that works on maltose and sucrase that work on sucrose. Lactase converts lactose to glucose and galactose, sucrase coverts sucrose to fructose and glucose and maltase converts maltose to multiple polymers of glucose. The highest end product of carbohydrates is glucose!

I hope you could understand! Tell me how well I did❣️ Still trying to explain why the body works the way it does and how it does it

With love,

Mojoyinoluwa

My reference is and always will be my Guyton and hall physiology textbook