How does food power the body?

Question

I've been thinking recently about how efficiently food and water seem to power the human body. But how? How does it really work? Does anyone know? Step by step in-depth rediculously detailed answers are what I'm looking for. I probably won't find them here but I'm going to keep searching for articles.

Example of details: don't just say 'blah converts blah into energy', say HOW. That's the good stuff. I'm thinking no one fully understands it because if we did wouldn't we be using that knowledge to make some sort of energy system that is rather different from what we use today (like generators and etc..)?

Answer 1

I'd say, for now, only God knows.  But I'll be willing to bet that in 50 years we'll have that answer.

Answer 2

OK, the digestive juices "break down" the food.

This chemical reaction is similar to "burning" something, yet goes much slower and involves chemicals

think of acid breaking down something. It melts it. Just like burning.

Now, these particles form mainly starches and protiens and such.....just as if you poured acid on food, it would form different piles of goo......it has been broken down into simpler forms....

I won't get into the common chemical equations of conversion.

these starches form into liquid sugars that actually get absorbed into the bloodstream and the blood brings these sugars and protiens to each individual cell.

Now, the cells live on the sugars and "burn" it as fuel......but again this burning takes place in the form of chemical equations so it is slow ...yet does produce heat...which maintains the body temp as well.

Hopefully thiws is OK, but entire books are written about the process, so it is very complex.

Answer 3

I suppose I could tell you all about glycolysis, the Krebs cycle, and the electron transport chain, but I still don't think that you would be satisfied.  You can look these things up yourself if you haven't already, but they are all basically "blah converts blah into energy."  How the human body does it all has to do with enzymes.  They are the magic of the physiological world.  DNA is converted to messenger RNA during transcription, and mRNA is converted to proteins during translation; many of these proteins go on to become enzymes.  There is a different enzyme to catalyze almost every chemical reaction that takes place in the body; for instance, during glycolysis, there is an enzyme that catalyzes the conversion of glucose to glucose-6-phosphate, another enzyme that converts glucose-6-phosphate to fructose-6-phosphate... all the way down the chain until you end up with pyruvate at the end of glycolysis.  Many enzymes require cofactors to work, many are only active at a certain pH, etc.  We can throw a bunch of amino acids into a test tube and end up with a molecule that is structurally identical to a particular enzyme but that is nonfunctional due to some activating factor that is missing.  Adenosine triphosphate (ATP) is the molecule in which energy is stored in our bodies (energy is stored in the bonds holding the phosphate groups together; when these bonds are broken, energy is released), but ATP is very unstable and outside of the body usually exists in a useless salt form.  Life began billions of years ago; mitochondria (the organelles in which ATP synthesis occurs) were once independent prokaryotic organisms that eventually formed an obligatory mutual symbiosis with eukaryotic cells (mitochondria even have their own DNA).  Evolution has had a LONG time to make us extremely efficient at what we do, and the whole process is far too complex to be duplicated in some laboratory.  Also, I am pretty sure that using ATP to generate energy for electricity would be ridiculously expensive.

Answer 4

yes the vitims in it spread threu the body so it can talk move think have s*x anything eveny react to things if it does get food unless you dont eat your body will die because u need to make blood ,cells organs all kinds of stuff to live

Answer 5

pf, thats easy.

it would take a little while to explain but you want to look into mitochondria , the ATP process and Krebs cycle and how they work.

hope this helps, it should be a good start.

Answer 6

what you are asking about is a very long topic that can not be explained here as an answer, and that's why you wouldn't get many detailed answers, not because no one understands it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metabolism

this should help you...

Answer 7

intestines soak it upp.

Answer 8

Carbs are in food which give you energy.

Answer 9

vitamins

Answer 10

Blah converts blah into blah =]