What is happening in small intestine?
What is happening in small intestine?
If we open our hand and put it flat against our belly button, with the thumb pointing up to the waist and pinkie pointing down.
Our hand actually covering most of the relatively small space into which 20 foot long small intestine is neatly coiled. When a the soupy partially digested chime spills from stomach into this part of digestive tube a whole new set of gastric are released.
These include:
- Pancreatic and intestinal enzymes that finish the digestion of proteins into amino acids.
- Bile a greenish liquid ( made in the over and stored in the gallbladder) that enables fats to mix with water.
- Alkaline pancreatic juices that make the chime less acidic so that amylases (the enzymes that break down carbohydrate) can goo back to work separating complex carbohydrate into simple sugars.
- Intestinal alcohol dehydrogenase, which digests alcohol not previously absorbed into your bloodstream.
The lining of the small intestine is a series of folds covered with projections that have been described as “finger-like” or “small nipples.”
The technical name for these small fingers/nipple is ‘villi’. Each villus is covered with smaller projections called ‘microvilli’ and every villus and microvillus is programmed to accept a specific nutrient – and no other.
Nutrient are absorbed not in their order or arrival in the intestine but according to how fast they’re broken down into their basic parts:
- Carbohydrate – which separate quickly into single sugar units - are absorbed first
- Proteins - as amino acids
- Fats – which take longest to break apart into their constituent fatty acids - are last. That’s why a high-fat meal keeps you feeling fuller longer than a meal such as chow mien or plain tossed salad, which are mostly low-fat carbohydrate.
- Vitamin that dissolve in water are absorbed earlier than vitamins that dissolve in fat.
