Question

You just ate a piece of corn on the cob, which is basically carbohydrates and undigestible material. Now you are going to describe what happens to that food until it exits the body by indicating digestive processes and the structures that make it happen.

Answer 1

The digestive process of carbohydrates starts in mouth

1. Mouth

• Teeth and mastication of food helps in mechanical digestion (breaking food into smaller particles)
• Saliva moistens food and it contain salivary amylase enzyme that breaks carbohydrates into polysaccharide, oligosaccharides, disaccharides.
• The food then passes into esophagus.

2. Stomach

• Food reaches stomach via esophagus.
• Hydrochloric acid released from stomach helps in killing pathogens present in food.
• Churning (mechanical digestion)takes place.
• No chemical digestion occurs here.
• The bolus is then passed to small intestine.

3. Small intestine

• Pancreas release pancreatic amylase, a enzyme that break polysaccharide into disaccharide.
• Intestinal brush border enzyme disaccharidase (lactase, maltase, sucrase) breakdown disaccharide into monosaccharide, which are then absorbed by intestinal villi.
• Lactase breakdown lactose into glucose and galactose
• Maltase breakdown maltose into 2 glucose molecule
• Sucrase breakdown sucrose into glucose and fructose
• The undigested food is then passed into large intestine.

4. Large intestine

• No digestion occurs here.
• Water is reabsorbed from undigested food.
• The undigested food is passed to rectum, an@l canal and finall expelled from body as stool.

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