Ap Powerpoint Presentation

1. I want to start with a picture of a doughnut. The reason why is because when we see it you begin to salivate because you might want to eat a doughnut. But it also has a hole in it, and if you were to stick your finger through the hole in a doughnut, that a lot like food moving through the hole that is your digestive system. In other words its going to move all the way from your mouth out your anus. But its not realy inside of you. When you stick your finger through the hole of a doughnut it not technically insdie the doughnut. Just like the food that goes through your digestive system is not technically inside your body, its just moving through a hole in your body. We can eventually absorb that material inside our body, but not until it gets very small.
2. So you are what you eat. What does that mean exactly? Well there are basically 4 types of macromolecules that make up life. From carbohydrates to nucleic acids, and so you going to take food like this delicious pizza, you’re going to break the polymers down into tiny little monomers and then you’re going to weave that back into you. So when you look at me now, what you’re really seeing is protein that was in food I ate weeks or even months ago.
3. The whole thing begins with our Pavlovian response. Some of you might be familiar with this through having taken Psychology. This was a Russian scientist who used dogs to measure the amount of saliva they had. There was a bell that he would ring, but basically he conditioned them so that when he rang the bell they would start to salivate, and the same thing works with us (Video). So basically when we see it we begin to salivate, we have glands, three big glands that are going to produce saliva that is going to empty into our mouth. Now the saliva has water in it but it mostly has mucus and also an enzyme called amylase. And amylase breaks down starch (amylose starch) and so it’s going to break down, or start to break down the carbohydrate. So basically are teeth