Study Guide: Digestion

To-Do Date: Sep 4 at 11:59am

Look at this cartoon. By the end of this module, you should be able to identify each organ and its function.

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In order to understand diabetes, we need to think about our food and our bodies both at the large scale (organs like our stomach or pancreas) but also on increasingly smaller scales ( like the molecules that make up our food, or the cells that make up our organs). Here is a flowchart that helps me to organize my thinking on the subject. This week we are going to focus on the first parts of this flowchart: Food--> Digestive System --> Subunits--> Absorbed

 

Text description of Diabetes Flowchart graphic (Word doc) Download Text description of Diabetes Flowchart graphic (Word doc)

 

Learning Objectives: By the end of the week you should be able to  a

• Explain the main goal of the digestive system: Why do we need to eat food? What happens to the macromolecules and subunits in the food? What happens after the subunits are absorbed into the blood stream?
• Explain the following processes and identify the organs where they take place  (note they usually happen in more than one  organ)
  • Digestion: mechanical and chemical 
  • Absorption
  • Elimination 
• Digestive enzymes: Why must they be present and functional in order for absorption to take place? Where are they produced? Where are they active?
• Why is a high surface area to volume ratio crucial for the small intestine? What gives the small intestine such a high surface area to volume ratio (more than one answer)