What is the journey of a cheese sandwich-digestion?
To understand the journey of a cheese sandwich through digestion, we need to break it down into different stages: ingestion, digestion, absorption, and elimination.
1. Ingestion: This is the process of taking in food through the mouth. When you eat a cheese sandwich, you use your teeth to break it down into smaller pieces and mix it with saliva to create a bolus, a soft, chewed mass of food.
2. Digestion: The digestion process begins in the mouth, where enzymes in the saliva start breaking down carbohydrates. As you swallow the bolus, it enters the esophagus and travels down to the stomach. In the stomach, gastric juices mix with the sandwich, releasing acids and enzymes like pepsin to break down proteins into smaller components. The sandwich also undergoes mechanical churning in the stomach to further break it down.
3. Absorption: After being partially digested in the stomach, the sandwich enters the small intestine. Here, the remaining food particles are broken down into even smaller molecules with the help of enzymes from the liver and pancreas. The nutrients, including proteins, fats, carbohydrates, and vitamins, are then absorbed through the walls of the small intestine into the bloodstream.
4. Elimination: What remains after the absorption of nutrients is mostly indigestible material, including fiber and waste products. This passes into the large intestine, where water is absorbed, and any remaining undigested substances are further broken down by bacteria. Finally, the waste is formed into feces and eliminated from the body through the rectum and anus.
So, the journey of a cheese sandwich through digestion involves breaking it down into smaller pieces, chemically and mechanically digesting it in the stomach, absorbing the nutrients in the small intestine, and eliminating the remaining waste through the large intestine.
Since this is not my area of expertise, I searched Google under the key words "digestion sequence" to get these possible sources:
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http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_is_fat_absorbed_in_digestion
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/163169/digestion
Relate the information to the contents of the sandwich.
In the future, you can find the information you desire more quickly, if you use appropriate key words to do your own search. Also see http://hanlib.sou.edu/searchtools/.
I hope this helps. Thanks for asking.