Digestion Slide
Digestion Slide
Digestion Slide
dr. Winarsi
The gastrointestinal tract is in essence, a continous mucous
membrane line tube extending from the oral cavity to the anus.
In health, with the single exception of the entry of the common
bile duct into the jejenum, the wall of this cylinder constitutes a
continuous barrier.
Absorption of materials from the gut into the rest of the body, normally
takes place only by transfer across biologic membranes.
Living organisms need hexoses, amino acids and fatty acids not only
as fuels to generate ATP, but also as building blocks to make
macromolecules.
For the most part, the food we eat consists of very large molecules
like polysaccharides, proteins, nucleic acids and triacylglycerols. Such
molecules cannot be efficiently transferred across the gut membrane
barrier. Instead, it is necessary to cleave these macromolecules into
their monomeric building blocks for them to be absorbed by the
organisms. The process by which this is accomplished is called
digestion.
These ingested macromolecules (polymers) have to be broken down to
monomers before they can be absorbed and made available to all cells
of the body.
The complete process from food intake to absorption of nutrient into the
blood consists of a complicated sequence of events.
Digestion of fat poses a
physicochemical problem because they are nonpolar compounds in an
aqueous environment. To solve this problem, the liver secretes bile salts
into the intestinal tract, which by virtue of their detergent action,
facilitates attack by lipolytic enzymes on fats.