No matter what we eat or drink, the body just seems to know exactly how to make use of it. How does the body recognize that protein and its corresponding amino acids from ground beef works all the same as protein from chicken, fish, or whatnot?
Do the nutrients just flow idly through the bloodstream and get pulled into where it needs to like a radio wave frequency?
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Okay so it doesn’t. The acids and other digestive and non digestive organs simply react differently to different bonds and chemicals. So the amino acids are processed in a different way simply because they are a different structure! It’s not so much our body going this is chicken i need to do this and more our body being evolved and changed over time to follow a very specific pattern and use very specific acids and other things to automatically sort everything.
For example your spit is really good at taking appart starches and the like. But less good at anything else.
As per uptake the walls of your digestive trackt arent fully closed they are closed enough to not allow most things through but specific substances that we need to enter our blood for example sugars and proteins are capable of passing through this wall to do so.
Well, for starters, the amino acids in beef are the same amino acids in chicken and are the same amino acids in spinach (kind of, more details later). And yes, basically, nutrients are available in the bloodstream for uptake in the places where it is needed. Your body also has a way of storing some nutrients in the places where it is needed the most, for example storing sugars in your muscles in the form of glycogen. Fun fact: glycogen is one of the major differences between dark meat and white meat, and is why dark meet tends to be a bit sweeter.
Now, as far as the amino acids go, humans use 20 amino acids to make the proteins we need to stay alive. Of those 20, we can make 11 all on our own, meaning we need the get the other 9 amino acids from our diet. These are called the essential amino acids. Each and every food you eat will have a different amino acid profile, which is to say that the levels of each amino acid present will vary from one kind of food to another. Generally speaking though, Meats tend to contain an abundance of the essential amino acids, while many plants do not contain the full amino acid profile. This is where the concept of an incomplete protein comes from, and the idea of balancing your plant-based protein intake to ensure you get the full amino acid profile. This all being said, the amino acids operate identically once they’re in your body independent of where they come from
So our digestive system is blind abd stupid. It doesn’t know in fact what to do, but it does some very generic things.
For example alpha-amylase is an enzyme that breaks down many different kinds of carbohydrates. Pepsin and trypsin in your stomach are two enzymes that break down any kind of protein into smaller peptides.
The reason is that these enzymes are not very specialized, they can break down a wide variety of stuff. Even if it comes from chicken or lettuce, because on the high level all life form on earth has the same chemical setup.
On the later steps there are more specialized enzymes that can take only a specific substrate like saccharose or glucose.
It’s easily possible that the high level enzyme can process something but the resulting stuff cannot be further processed. If so, then it’s going out of your body unprocessed.
Your premise is incorrect.There are a number of substances that our bodies cannot process, or cannot do so safely. Poisons, things we have allergies to, drugs, cellulose, motor oil, etc.
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