Question

It is 3pm and you are hungry, but it is too early for dinner so you decide to eat a Snickers bar. Since a Snickers has sugar, fat and protein many of the metabolic pathways you have learned about this semester kick into gear.

a. Explain (words or diagram or combo of both) how the fat from the candy is processed, starting with absorption in the digestive system and ending with storage in adipose cells.

b. Apply the redundancy = efficiency theme specifically between glucose metabolism and protein metabolism from the ingested candy bar. You may write sentences, draw diagrams, make a bulleted list, etc. or any combo.

Answer 1

a. The fat digestion starts in the mouth, where it is broken down into its components by the enzymes present in the saliva (lingual lipase). The fat, then go to the stomach via the esophagus. The acid acid present in the stomach also digests the fat..It then moves to the small intestine where the bile juice containing bile acids and the pancreatic juice conatining the pancreatic lipase break down the fat into fatty acids and glycerol/cholestrol. These components are packed into micelles like tiny particles known as the chylomicrons. The chylomicrons are then absorbed into the blood stream form where tey are transported throughout the body. the adipose tissue takes the triglycerides from the chylomicrons for storage, and the cholestrol is stored in the liver.

b. When the glucose is not needed by the cells or they are present in abundance, it is stored in the forms of glycogen. However, the protein is not stored in the body. Most of the body is composed of protein, so the absorbed protein is mostly used up by the body for repairs and such. However, if it is present in abundance, it is first converted into triglycerides and glucose, and then stored in the body.