crash course biological molecules you are what you eat

What are macronutrients?

Direct link to Paul Vinell's post “Macronutrients are nutrie...”. more. Macronutrients are nutrients that provide energy; proteins, fat and carbohydrates. Fat does not just provide us with energy, it's used in vitamin absorption, your brain, your cells, hormones, hair, skin, etc.

What enzyme breaks down cellulose?

So throw that on some cellulose in an ionic solution, and cellulose will break down into its components, i.e. D-glucose.

What are lipids made of?

Lipids are made up of the same elements as carbohydrates: carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. However, lipids tend to contain many more hydrogen atoms than oxygen atoms.

Why is fat important?

They are important for your body to function. Fat does not make you fat by itself. An excess amount of anything that provides you with energy, will be stored as fat, so you can use the energy later. Fat can be stored as fat, just like carbohydrates and protein can.

Can cellulose be converted to starch?

There is no way to directly convert cellulose to starch (like simple mutarotation). However, there are a few multi-step chemical processes that could be utilized to turn cellulose into starch, and, of course, enzymes that catalyze each reaction step.

What are the ingredients of life?

They are the ingredients for life, and we call them the carbohydrates, the lipids, the proteins, and the nucleic acids.

What are carbohydrates made of?

Carbohydrates are made up of sugars, and the simplest of them are called monosaccharides. "Mono" for one, "saccharides" for the actual root of the word sugar. The star of the show here is glucose, because it’s truly fundamental, by which I mean, like, number one on the global food chain, because it comes from the sun.

What are triglycerides and phospholipids?

So remember that triglycerides are three fatty acids connected to a glycerol. Swap one of those fatty acids out for a phosphate group, and you have a phospholipid. These make up cell membrane walls. Since that phosphate group gives that end a polarity, it’s attracted to water.

How are amino acids formed?

Amino acids form long chains called polypeptides. Proteins are formed when these polypeptides not only connect but elaborate and, frankly, really elegant structures. They fold. They coil. They twist. If they were sculptures, I would go the museum every day just to look at them, and I'd walk straight past the nudes without even looking.#N#But protein synthesis is only possible if you have all of the amino acids necessary, and there are nine of them that we can't make ourselves: histidine, isoleucine, leucine, lysine, methionine, phenylalanine, threonine, tryptophan, and valine. By eating foods that are high in protein, we can digest them down into their base particles, and then use these essential amino acids in building up our own proteins. Some foods, especially ones that contain animal protein, have all of the essential amino acids, including this egg.

What is the process of getting energy from glucose?

And every cell that needs energy uses glucose to get that energy through a process called respiration. In addition to glucose, there are other monosaccharides like fructose, which has the same molecular formula (C 6 H 12 O 6) but arranged differently. These subtle chemical differences do matter.

What are the two main ingredients in fat?

Fats ( 07:47) Fats are made up mainly of two chemical ingredients: glycerol, which is a kind of alcohol; and fatty acids, which are long carbon-hydrogen chains that end in a carboxyl group. When you get three fatty acid molecules together and connect them to a glycerol, that’s a triglyceride.

Why are fats and lipids grouped together?

All of our mom’s worst enemies, the fat, which turn out to be, actually, really important, and are the most familiar sort of a very important biological molecule, the lipid.#N#Lipids are smaller and simpler than complex carbohydrates, and they’re grouped together because they share an inability to dissolve in water. This is because their chemical bonds are mostly non-polar. And since water, as we learned in the previous episode, despises non-polar molecules, the two do not mix. It's like oil and water. In fact, it's exactly like oil and water. And if you’ve ever read a nutrition label, or seen this thing called the television, you're probably pretty conversant in the way that we classify fats. But then, you know, 99% of us have no idea what those classifications actually mean.