Have you ever watched an inquisitive child with a box of Lego? They can follow the instructions to build the pirate ship or the castle exactly as it appears on the box. But if you hand that same child a completed Lego structure, say a magnificent Lego ship you built yourself, you will notice something very primal. Something that resonates with nature itself. This little master builder does something entirely unexpected. He will take that ship you so carefully constructed, break it apart with joyful abandon, and use the individual bricks to build something entirely his own. A spaceship perhaps. Or a fantastical creature. A skyscraper that exists only in his imagination.
Our bodies are exactly like that master builder. When we look at the digestion process, it is simple in its grand design. It looks at the food you eat as completed Lego structures. A work of art, yes, but not one with its own personal signature. Like that little child, the body gets down to disassembling the gift of food you have given. It starts breaking down complex food macromolecules to get to the constituent Lego blocks.
So if you think that the protein shake you are planning to consume is going to gift you protein that your body can use directly, then your concepts are as shaky as mine were when I assumed that taking collagen would help my body with easy collagen. It does not work that way. Back to our little master.
So when I swallow a Tofu pirate ship or a Hamburglar superhero, it does not get very far. The inquisitive, creative master that our body is starts to dismantle this gift brick by brick.
The Demolition Crew
This is where enzymes come in. They are the demolition crew, the expert hands that know exactly how to pull those structures apart.
Think about carbohydrates. When you eat a piece of bread or a potato, you are consuming complex chains of sugars. It could be a long, tangled chain of polysaccharides, a short name for long chains of sugars, or a simple disaccharide, which is just a complicated way of addressing a lovely sweet couple, two sugars tied by a molecular knot. To disassemble these structures made of sugars, our body deploys enzymes called amylases. What do they do? They take those long, intricate structures and break them down until they arrive at the individual block, the monosaccharide. That is the Lego brick. Once you have the brick, you stop. You use it to build.
Then there is protein. A steak, an egg, a handful of lentils, these are all magnificent structures, but they are nothing but Lego structures built out of amino acids. The enzymes that handle this are the proteolytic enzymes. They begin a process called proteolysis, also known as protein breakdown. They start to disassemble the big protein chains. They might break a huge chain into smaller chains, which we call peptides. And then they keep going, finally arriving at the constituent amino acids.
Finally we have fats. Most of the fats we consume are present as triglycerides, a glycerol handle holding on to three fatty acids. In this special configuration, the individually acrid, nasty tasting fatty acids become part of something wonderful. These fats are first emulsified or dispersed into fine micelles that appear somewhat like the foam when you wash oils off your hair using a shampoo. These small micelles have a much greater surface area. Our pancreatic lipases are the tools that break these triglycerides apart, separating the fatty acids from the handle. This yields 2-monoacylglycerol plus free fatty acids, which are then absorbed by the cells lining our gut. Inside these cells, they reform triglycerides and their journey of integration begins.
In the gut, the undigested Lego structures like fiber and resistant starch are broken down by our helping hands, our microbiome. These tiny residents use the complex molecules we cannot handle and create simple building blocks like short chain fatty acids, along with a host of beneficial connector molecules that snugly plug into our metabolic machinery. These fatty acids are highly beneficial to the body. They are anti-inflammatory. They help with nutrition. They stabilize your system. They reduce intestinal stress and the stress that radiates from it. They even help in lowering cancer risk, because when cells are not stressed, when they are not damaged, that environment naturally fights the pro-inflammatory conditions where cancer can take root.
The Body, The DIY Artist
So why go through all this trouble? Why this meticulous deconstruction?
Because your body is a do-it-yourself artist. It does not trust the ready made assembled structures you give it. It wants the raw materials. It wants the individual Lego bricks so it can build something with its own unique signature.
Imagine for a moment that you love groundnuts. You love them so much that you think, instead of all this digestion trouble, why not just inject groundnut protein directly into my blood? What would happen? Your body would not say, ah, delicious groundnut protein, just what I needed. Instead it would treat that protein as an invader, an intruder. Your immune system would mount a massive attack, potentially leading to anaphylactic shock. The body rejects the pre-built structure because it does not bear its own signature.
This is a profound insight. The protein I make has a distinct signature from the protein you make. It is why blood transfusions are so complex. We cannot simply swap blood because the proteins within might not match, triggering an immune reaction. The body is not just a factory. It is an artist. It wants to take the raw clay, the amino acids, the simple sugars, the fatty acids, and shape it, mold it, and stamp it with its own unique mark.
This is why you cannot eat animal cartilage to fix your own cartilage, or eat animal brain to make yourself smarter. That cartilage will be broken down into its constituent amino acids. Those amino acids will then be taken up by your body. But whether they are assembled into cartilage or muscle or a hormone depends entirely on you. If you are sleeping all day and eating a lot of animal muscle, hoping to build your own muscles, you will be disappointed. The raw materials are there, but without the external stimulus, without the signal that says we need to build muscle here, those amino acids will be used for something else. The body has a DIY mentality. It does the building itself, guided by its own needs and your actions.
When the Builders Stop
This process is so fundamental, so critical, that our very lives depend on these enzymes working correctly. They are however thermolabile. They are sensitive to heat.
This is the hidden danger of a severe fever. When our body temperature climbs to 107 or 108 degrees Fahrenheit and stays there, the danger is not the fever itself. The danger is that the heat begins to denature our enzymes. It warps their structure. And when these enzymes are broken down, no reactions are possible within your body. Digestion stops. Integration stops. Transformation stops. The demolition crew quits, and the master builder has no tools. If the enzymes are gone, the human function itself ceases to be. We do not die from the heat. We die because the builders have left the construction site.
So the next time you eat, remember the invisible work being done. Remember the amylases, the proteases, and the lipases working tirelessly to dismantle your meal. Remember the microbiome, those helping hands that finish what we cannot. They are not just digesting food. They are curating a collection of Lego bricks so that the unique artist that is your body can build something extraordinary. And that rebuilding happens daily, meal by meal, brick by brick.
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