After school you get home and you are starving, but you just want a snack. What should I eat?, you ask yourself. Then, after looking through the cabinets for a few minutes, you find Cheetos and decide to eat a few. With just the presence of those Cheetos in your sight, the digestion process begins in your 9 meter long digestive tract.Crunch, Crunch, Crunch. As you munch on those first few Cheetos the digestion process begins in your mouth. Here, mechanical digestion begins to reduce the size of the Cheeto and mixes the food particles with saliva. The tongue helps mix and move the pieces of Cheeto throughout the mouth. The salivary glands in the mouth also contribute to the breakdown of the Cheetos in the mouth. They secrete amylase and mucus. The parotid glands begin chemical digestion on the Cheetos. It secretes a clear, watery fluid that is high in amylase. The enzyme, amylase, begins to breakdown carbohydrates into disaccharides. The other two salivary glands, the submandibular and the sublingual, secrete saliva containing mucus, which binds and lubricates the Cheeto particles for easy swallowing. Now the food has been formed into a bolus with the help of saliva, the tongue, and teeth. Next the bolus travels into the pharynx, where the epiglottis closes off the top of the trachea so no food can enter. Then it moves on to the esophagus, where peristaltic waves push the food toward the stomach. The food enters the stomach through the cardiac sphincter at the end of the esophagus.Now the Cheetos have entered the stomach. The process of breaking down carbohydrates has already begun in the mouth and now more chemical and mechanical digestion will take place in the stomach. Once the bolus has entered the stomach, it mixes with gastric juice, starts protein digestion, and absorbs a limited amount. Here the chief cells secrete the inactive enzyme pepsinogen and the parietal calls secrete hydrochloric acid. When mixed to...
