Digestion

Digestion is one of the most important processes for the human organism, it is necessary to know how it influences the behavior of the rest of the vital functions of our body. The digestive process is highly complex and has numerous stages or complementary sub-processes. We will be talking about all this in this guide, where we will delve into some of the basic and elementary aspects that you should know to increase your cognitive level about the human organism.

Definition

We call digestion the process that consists of breaking down food by hydrolysis, this allows us to fractionate such food to obtain nutrients, energy and other compounds necessary for the body.

Digestion is a process that responds to the catabolic function, being this important metabolic function that allows us to obtain the necessary nutrients from our food by breaking them down and releasing energy.

As a general rule, digestion is usually classified into three types, extracellular digestion, intracellular digestion and mixed digestion. These classifications are based on the origin or location of digestion, but are part of the same concept.

Digestion processes

The digestive process is composed of different steps that take place in the digestive system. The first step is ingestion, which, as its name indicates, refers to the moment when we ingest a certain food. It is ingestion that is responsible for starting the digestive cycle, although this does not mean that our digestive system only works every time we ingest a food, it is in constant operation. It is said that it is ingestion that starts the digestive cycle just to illustrate the logical order of the processes.

Then follows the propulsion, which is an intermediate stage that collaborates in the fractionation of the food and allows to lead them towards their subsequent chemical degradation.

The chemical degradation or digestion is the one that follows the mechanical one. While in mechanical digestion we fractionate the food into smaller particles, in chemical digestion it is the body's own components and chemical fluids that reduce and transform the particles so that they can be absorbed by the body, taking from them all the elements that are useful for the body and ultimately discarding those that are not.

Being exact, the chemical digestion is a stage that is always present, if we take into account that the first fluid that intervenes in the chemical decomposition of the foods is the saliva, we can notice that from the very ingestion of the foods they are already being submitted to this.

Recommendations

Since digestion is such an important process for the human being, it is necessary tha