What is digestion ? Starting from the mouth, state the various steps involved in digestion.
Answers
Answer:
Mouth. The mouth is the beginning of the digestive tract. In fact, digestion starts here as soon as you take the first bite of a meal. Chewing breaks the food into pieces that are more easily digested, while saliva mixes with food to begin the process of breaking it down into a form your body can absorb and use.
Answer:
Digestion is a process by which an organism breaks down food into simpler substances so that the body can absorb it for energy
Mouth - the digestion starts from the mouth, when the food enters to mouth, our buccal cavity produces a juice called saliva and this saliva contains an enzyme called the salivary amylase, this enzyme converts some parts of the carbohydrate in the foods to simple sugar or glucose
Oeusophagus - after the mouth, it enters a long tube called the oeusophagus, it takes to partially digested food to the stomach, they do that by the paristaltic movement, the muscles contract and expand in the oeusophagus creating a wave like movement in which the food moves down to the stomach and this movement is called paristaltic movement
Stomach - when it reaches the stomach, there are a lot of glands present in the stomach called the gastric glans which produce gastric juice, the gastric juice has 3 enzymes, pepsin, mucus and Hydrochloric acid, the hydrochloric acid creates an acidic medium in the stomach for the pepsin to act on the food, the pepsin converts protien into simpler substances while mucus protects the inner lining of the stomach from the hydrochloric acid
Small intestine - before it enters the small intestine the liver produces the bile juice which turns the acidic medium to basic medium and in the small intestine, complete digestion takes place. Protien gets converted into amino acids, carbohydrate into glucose and fats into fatty acids and glycerol, these digested food gets absorbed by finger like projections present inside the small intestine called villi which is very rich in blood, the villi absorbs this ans the blood inside it transports into to different parts of the body
Large intestine - Here is where the water gets absorbed, after enough food is absorbed in the small intestine, the digested food moved to the large intestine where the water gets absorbed
Anus - after the large intestine absorbs the water, the rest of the materials also known as waste materials gets executed or thrown out through the anus