Yes, I did google it but my pea sized brain can’t seem to understand it
In: Biology
Going for an ELI5 style answer. Think about making bread. There’s the flour, egg, water, etc. but if you mix all those you don’t just get bread. You need the yeast to help it rise, and the oven to cook it. Without the yeast you’d get a very dense lump of ‘bread’, and without the oven you’d just have a sloppy mess.
Using the stomach and digestion as our example. The stomach is like the oven, but instead of heat it has stomach acid. Your teeth macerate the food and your stomach acid helps it break down, but it isn’t in the tiniest form yet your body needs to be able to absorb it. That’s where enzymes come in. For the bread, the yeast is that little extra that is needed to make it rise and be what we think of as bread. For the body, the enzymes are little protein strands that break down the more complex elements into the size our body can use.
On their own, enzymes aren’t really much as they are designed to break down a limited range of complex molecules, however, they are vital to our body doing its job properly.
(Really hope I didn’t over simplify and use a bad metaphor.)
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