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?
In: 1
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.
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