Digestion (15 points)
On Tuesday, March 12 I ate a turkey wrap, French fries and fruit snacks. This was a pretty carbohydrate heavy meal. The digestion of carbohydrates begins in the mouth. The salivary enzyme amylase begins the breakdown of food starches, from the fries, the actual wrap, and sugar from the fruit snacks, into maltose, a disaccharide. Through the breaking down and chewing, it becomes a bolus, which travels down the esophagus, where no significant digestion of carbohydrates takes place. The bolus then enters the stomach, where the acidic environment stops the action of the amylase enzyme. The next step of carbohydrate digestion takes place in the duodenum. It mixes with the digestive secretion from the pancreas, liver, and gallbladder, which breaks down the food into monosaccharides (glucose). The monosaccharides are produced and absorbed by the small intestine and then can be used in metabolic pathways to harness energy.
The digestion of the protein coming from the turkey mostly takes place in the stomach. Once the bolus reaches the stomach from the esophagus, the enzyme pepsin breaks down the intact protein to peptides, which are short chain of amino acids. In the duodenum, other enzymes act on the peptides reducing them to smaller peptides and eventually individual amino acids. The amino acids are t...
