Digestion - What Is It? | Physiology | Biology | FuseSchool
Channel: FuseSchool - Global Education
Date: 2017-07-02

This juicy burger has so many good things in it that my body needs. Protein and fats in the meat and cheese, carbohydrates in the bun, vitamins, minerals and fiber in the salad.

But how can I use them? I need to get them into my.That's where digestion comes in, digestion is the process of breaking down food to make it soluble in the blood.

You can digest food in two ways, mechanically and chemically. When I put this burger in my mouth I do both types of digestion. My mouth breaks it down mechanically using my teeth, this mashes up the food into smaller pieces. 

My saliva carries out chemical digestion. It contains an enzyme called amylase that takes the big starch molecules you find in the bun and breaks them into smaller pieces called maltose. 

However this is just the beginning of the digestive journey and a lot more needs to happen before this burger is going to be small enough to be absorbed into the blood and taken around to all my hungry cells that needs the nutrients. 

Humans carry out internal digestion as the food is digested inside our bodies. However other organisms digest the food outside their bodies. Fungi for example are called saprophytes, this means that they secrete enzymes out of their cells onto food around them and then absorb the nutrients once they have been broken down. House flies do a similar process where they secrete a solvent onto the food and then suck up the nutrients.

The whole process of digestion can take a long time. It takes 6-8 hours for food to pass through the stomach and small intestine, and almost 40 hours before you see the remains of your burger coming out the other end!

Probably the most amazing thing about digestion however, is that a lot of it isn't actually done by ourselves but by 100 trillion bacteria living inside our guts! They help break down certain foods for us, make vitamins and help with the immune system. 

So there you go, with the crushing, some enzymes and some friendly bacteria you can turn this juicy burger into small soluble molecules than can be carried around in the blood.


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