How does villi increase the surface area for absorption?
Answers
The small intestine is folded into villi which has many microvilli.
The villi has a finger like structure and the microvilli acts as a hairlike on those fingers.
Both of them expand to increase the surface area so more nutrients can be absorbed.
They both are made up of a single layer of cells.
One way to visualize how villi increase surface area is to compare your intestinal lining to a piece of ribbon. If you stretch the ribbon out and lay it flat in a space between your fingers, you can fit far less of it in that space than if you bunched it up and laid it down in a wavy pattern. The villi create a similarly folded, wavy texture on the intestinal lining, which is how the body fits a football field-sized area into the small space of your abdomen.