A cheeseburger consists of bread, meat and cheese.

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A cheeseburger consists of bread, meat and cheese. The bread contains carbohydrates which gives us energy. The meat contains protein which helps to build up the body and the cheese contains fats and oils, lipids, which also give us energy, and the fats in addition keep us warm and oils on the surface help to keep the body waterproof. There is also water and salt in the cheeseburger. The salts help to make tissues and organs in the body work properly and water provides a fluid in which other substances can move around the body and react together within the cells. Here are all of the stages in which a cheeseburger needs to go through to be digested.

To begin with, the digesting of the cheeseburger starts in the mouth. Here, physical digestion takes place as the food is broken into smaller pieces by the grinding and chewing of the teeth. This then increases the surface area of the food making it easier for enzymes to digest it. The mouth produces a digestive juice, which makes it easier for the food to be digested, called saliva which contains the enzyme salivary amylase and this comes from the salivary gland. This enzyme begins the digestion of carbohydrates in the food by breaking down starch, from the bread, into maltase. This process is chemical digestion.  

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After this the food is taken down a long tube, called the oesophagus, which takes the food from the mouth to the stomach. The movement of the food is helped by waves of contraction of the muscle surrounding the oesophagus, this is called peristalsis.

Once the food enters the stomach a ring of muscle at the exit called the pyloric sphincter contracts and prevents the food from leaving. For the next two to three hours churning movements of the stomach produce further physical breakdown of food. The only chemical digestion that takes place in the stomach is ...

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