By: Danny Moon
You could call the digestion system amazing. Your body takes whatever morsel of food you give it, breaks it down, brings out all the nutrients it can, and discards the waste. It’s an astonishing example of chemistry in action, and it happens every 24 hours.
Our body relies on three major types of food — carbohydrates or carbs, fats, and proteins. During digestion, these three types of food are broken down by the same type of chemical reaction called hydrolysis. Hydrolysis is the breakdown of a compound when it reacts with water. Let’s take a look at how each type of food is broken down.
Carbohydrates are found in vegetables, fruits, dairy products, bread, and candy. They’re polymers or molecules built from repeating units called monomers. You can think of a polymer as a chain and monomers as individual links.
Sugars, starches, and cellulose are carbohydrates. Sugar molecules are the simplest type of carbohydrates. These sugars can be made of one or two units, known as monosaccharides or disaccharides.
Glucose is a common monosaccharide. It’s a component of table sugar, starch, and cellulose, the main component of green plants. When we eat food that contains glucose, our body uses it to produce energy.
Glucose is the only sugar used by brain cells. Eating the right kind of carbohydrates provides the glucose that helps our brains work properly. But that doesn’t mean you should consume tons of soda and candy. You’ll get a quick boost of energy, but then your body releases insulin to vacuum up this flood of simple sugars for later use. Soon after this process, less glucose is available to your brain making you unable to focus.
A common disaccharide is table sugar or sucrose. It’s made of the combination of a glucose molecule and fructose molecule through a type of chemical reaction called condensation polymerization. This is the opposite of hydrolysis because a water molecule is released instead of being used in the reaction. During digestion, sucrose is broken down through hydrolysis.
Complex carbohydrates are found in fruits, and vegetables, whole grains, bread, pasta, and dairy products. Starch is an example of a complex carbohydrate. It’s commonly found in potatoes, corn, and rice. Starch consists of thousands of individual glucose molecules bonded together. Breakdown of starch starts moments after you take your first bite of food, thanks to an enzyme called alpha-amylase found in your saliva.
Next, let’s talk about enzymes for a second. Enzymes help speed up chemical reactions and play an important role in digestion. One of the reactions they speed up is hydrolysis. This helps break down large molecules too big to pass through the intestinal wall into the blood.
Enzymes help break down big molecules such as carbs, proteins, and fats into smaller ones that are easily absorbed into the bloodstream — the simple sugars that come from carbs, the amino acids that come from proteins, and the fatty acids that come from fats. This brings us to the second main food type, fats.
Fats are triesters composed of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms. A triester is produced through the chemical reaction of three fatty acid molecules with glycerol, a molecule that contains three hydroxyl groups. When fats are broken down, these fatty acid chains and glycerol are free for the body to use.
Fatty acids are essential to constructing cell membranes. Our body contains about 100 trillion cells. So you can see why fatty acids are so important. Fats are also a great source of energy. They produce twice as much gram-for-gram as carbohydrates or proteins.
The third food group consists of proteins. Proteins come from animal sources such as chicken, fish, and dairy. And from plant sources such as grains, seeds, nuts, and vegetables. Proteins are made of repeating units called amino acids, which are held together by peptide bonds. During digestion, proteins are broken down into amino acids through hydrolysis.
The amino acids dissolve in our blood and are carried to tissues and organs. There, the amino acids are either used as a source of energy or are assembled into proteins through condensation polymerization. These newly made proteins are used to make hormones, bones, muscles, skin, and blood.
The digestive system is elegantly simple, yet mind-boggling in its speed, efficiency, and complexity. Best of all, after you swallow your food, this amazing disassembly line is involuntary, and all the chemical reactions involved in digestion are variations of the same type of reaction, hydrolysis. So the next time you eat, think about how the chemical breakdown of food is so elaborately simple, no matter what type of food you’re eating.
By: Danny Moon
November 14, 2024
