Nutrition, Feeding, and

Digestion
Estimated 8% in China
Not a disease
Lactase

• Newborn babies and infants are able to digest the lactose.

• Humans (lactose intolerant) usually cease production of lactase

by the age of 3–4 years

• Mutations in promoter region leads to lactase persistence

Nutrition, Feeding, Digestion,
and Absorption
• Eating (drinking milk) a food substance
is usually not sufficient for the
substance to have nutritional value.

• Nutritional value meets the nutrient

needs.
All Animals Must Eat Repeatedly

• The dynamic state of body constituents.

• The chemical-bond energy used in metabolism cannot be

reused.

• Must be acquired by food ingestion.

Nutrition
Nutrition

• The chemical compounds that compose the bodies of animals.

• How animals are able to synthesize the chemical components

of their bodies from the chemical materials they collect from
their environments.

• The energy available from foods.

The composition of the adult human body
Proteins, “foremost”

• Derived from the Greek

• All amino acids contain nitrogen.

• Proteins are about 16% nitrogen by weight

• Nitrogen is a limiting element in many ecosystems.

Amino Acids

• Standard amino acids

• Essential in insects, fish, and

birds

• Additional essential amino

acids for some insects and
birds
Keep Storage of Amino Acids or Proteins?

• When an animal eats amino acids in excess of those it needs

for the synthesis of functioning proteins at the time, it promptly
strips the amino groups (−NH2) from the carbon chains of the
excess amino acids. (Deamination)

• The amino acids in an animal’s body at any one time are

generally constituents of functioning protein molecules.
Source of Nitrogen for Synthesis of
Nonessential Amino Acids
• Generally, the nitrogen containing amino groups are derived
from other amino acids.

• For a nonessential amino acid to be synthesized, other amino

acids must be available to serve as amino-group donors.
A “Just In Time” Strategy for Protein Synthesis

• The amino acid building blocks that an animal needs for protein
synthesis must arrive in the body at the same time that the
proteins are actually being synthesized.

• A shortage of any one essential amino acid can cause wastage

of available supplies of other essential amino acids.
Lipids

• Diverse, nonpolar, hydrophobic

• Fatty acids (triacylglycerols, fat, oil), waxes

phospholipids, and sterols

• Saturated, Unsaturated, Polyunsaturated (2 to 6)

• Biochemical flexible, and can be stored

Essential Fatty Acids

• omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids

• α-linolenic acid (ω-3) and linoleic acid (ω-6), “Vitamin F”

• EPA, DHA, omega-3

• Modify relatively long fatty acids

Essential in Nutrition

• A nutrient is essential to an animal if the animal—in and of

itself—cannot synthesize it in amounts sufficient for its
requirements and thus must get it from other organisms or from
the nonliving environment.

• Vitamins, minerals, and certain fatty acids are essential in this

sense, in addition to the essential amino acids.
Carbohydrates

• Provide structural support and shape

Chitin (arthropods), cellulose, and hemicelluloses are the most
abundant organic compounds in the biosphere.

• As storage compounds, more dynamically

• As transport compounds, e.g. blood transport sugar, lactose

“nutritional problem”?
Low Energy, Low Amount as Storage
Vitamins

• Organic compounds required in small (often minute) amounts

• Diverse in their chemical structures

• The water-soluble vitamins, notably the B vitamins, are

essential for most or all animals. The lipid-soluble vitamins,
such as vitamins A and K, are more specialized in their
functions and not as universally required.
Minerals

• Also essential nutrients

• Metal atoms occur in approximately 40% of proteins

• Required as constituents of body fluids and skeletons

• More than 20 chemical elements are required for the

construction of animal bodies
The Great Serengeti Migration
Feeding

• The process of obtaining and ingesting foods

• Needs to be targeted at food items that will meet an animal’s

nutritional needs.
Behavioral Food Selection

• Individuals with particular nutrient needs

often behaviorally select foods that will
meet those specific needs.

• Wolf spiders select the flies they eat in

ways that balance their intake of protein
and lipid
Three Feeding Modes

• Attack of individual prey items (Orcas)

• Suspension feeding (Blue Wales)

• Association with symbiotic microbes (Corals)

Attack of Individual Prey Items

• This feeding mode requires that the individual food organisms

be located, identified, subdued, and ingested.
Birds Bill Specialization
Figure 6.11 Specialization of an invertebrate feeding apparatus
Toxic Compounds

• Used as poisons (venoms) by predators, mostly proteins

(scorpions, spiders, many snakes)

• Used as defenses (secondary compounds) by potential prey,

chemically extremely diverse (bees, wasps, plants)

• Some herbivores and predators can defeat defenses based on

secondary compounds.
Suspension Feeding
• Feeding on objects (suspended in water), that are very small by
comparison with the feeding animal (relative size matters)

• Common in aquatic animals, certain spiders (suspension in air)

• Clams and oysters (many centimeters long vs. 5–50

micrometers)

• Required to collect large numbers of food items.

• Do not single out and attack food items individually

Why?

• Suspended food items are abundant

in aquatic systems.

• Suspension feeding permits animals

to feed lower on food chains, where
food productivity tends to be
particularly great.
Suspension Feeders

• Many of the largest animals on Earth

• Some of the most productive animal populations on Earth

• Crabeater seals, are not actually “crab eaters”

• Shrimplike krill, key foods in the Antarctic Ocean.

How to Gather Food Items?
More Mechanisms

• Baleen whales employ mechanical sieving (analogous to

filtering) to collect food.

• Suspension-feeding devices usually collect food items from the

water by employing hydrodynamic forces, electrostatic
attractions, chemical attractions, targeted grasping by tiny
appendages, and other processes distinct from sieving.
Hydrodynamic Concentration
Symbioses with Microbes

• Photosynthetic Autotrophs

• Chemosynthetic Autotrophs

• Heterotrophs
Symbioses with Photosynthetic Autotrophs
The Reef-building Corals

Occur only in clear or shallow waters

Stability of The Symbiotic Association

Bleached
 Symbioses with Chemosynthetic Autotrophs
in Hydrothermal-vent Communities
• Occur at places where warm water rises out of underwater
cracks (vents) in Earth’s crust

• Chemoautotrophic sulfur-oxidizing bacteria

• Sulfur acts as an energy shuttle in these communities.

• Animal symbioses with chemosynthetic autotrophs also

common near oil seeps.
Symbioses with Heterotrophic Gut
Microbiome
• Populations of many species of heterotrophic microbes living in
animal gut lumen (entirely devoid of O2)

• Lacks gut microbes prior to birth, finally reach about ten times
the number of mammalian cells in the animal’s body

• Chronic changes in the gut microbiome can contribute to

chronic diseases such as obesity, diabetes, and inflammatory
diseases.
Fermenters (animals)

• Symbiotic associations with fermenting microbes in specialized

gut structures (enlarged or dilated chambers, not strongly acidic)

• Foregut (the esophagus and stomach) in many cases

• Fermenting microbes (anaerobic)

• A cow’s rumen
Vertebrate Foregut Fermenters

• Ruminant mammals, all herbivores

• Sheep, antelopes, cattle, goats, camelids,

moose, deer, giraffes, and buffaloes

• The first and largest compartment, to which

the esophagus connects, is the rumen.
Stomach Chambers
omasum

reticulum

• Rumen and Reticulum,

function together

• Omasum, leaflike folds, filter

• Abomasum, true stomach

Function one, breakdown

• Fermentative breakdown of compounds that the animal cannot

digest, cellulose, hemicelluloses

• Short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs), by the microbial breakdown of

plant structural carbohydrates.

• CO2 and methane (CH4) voided to the atmosphere by belching

Function Two, Synthetic

• Synthesize B vitamins
Sufficient amounts for sheep and cattle

• Synthesize essential amino acids (EAAs)

The Microbe synthesize their own cellular proteins, which
is later digested and lower the animals requirement for
EAAs.
Function Three, Recycle

Permit waste nitrogen from animal metabolism to be recycled

into new animal protein rather than being excreted.

• The urea can diffuse from the blood into the rumen, where
certain of the microbes break down the urea to make ammonia
(NH3), which can be used by neighboring microbes for protein
synthesis.
Vertebrate Hindgut Fermenters
Functions?

• Same for short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs)

• Microbes from hindgut communities are not automatically

digested

• Supply B vitamins and EAAs, and recycling nitrogen?

Eat Defecated Material

• Some eat ordinary feces.

• The soft feces consist of material from the

cecum that is enclosed in a mucous
membrane and that passes through the full
length of the colon without being altered.
Invertebrate Symbioses with
Heterotrophic Microbes
• Lower termites, wood eaters, cellulose breakdown

• Novel roles of microbial symbionts:

Synthesize required precursors for making sterols
Those that feed on vertebrate blood, digest blood and may
produce antibiotics that prevent the decay of blood during
processing
Gut Microbiome in Humans

• Most of the species of gut microbes are bacteria

• Relatively stable within one individual animal

• Three enterotypes (the composition of their gut microbiome)

• Individual people vary in their normal physiology in ways that

depend on functions being performed by their gut communities
Digestion

The breakdown of food molecules by enzyme action (or other

animal-mediated processes) into smaller chemical components
that an animal is capable of distributing to the tissues of its body.
Extracellular digestion, principal mode of digestion in
vertebrates, arthropods, and many other animals.
Intracellular digestion, in sponges, coelenterates, flatworms, and
some molluscs.
Headgut

• The parts of the digestive tract in the head and neck

• To capture and engulf food and to prepare the food for

digestion

• The preparation of food can be minimal as swallowing or

extensive and involves chewing or grinding, the addition of
lubricating agents, and the addition of digestive enzymes
Foregut

• The parts of the digestive tract between the headgut and the
intestines (the esophagus and stomach)

• The esophagus moves food from the headgut to the stomach.

• The stomach stores ingested food, initiates protein digestion

(Pepsins), and breaks up food by a combination of muscular,
acid (pH 0.8 in human), and digestive-enzyme effects.
Midgut

• The first segment of the intestines, “small” intestine

• The principal site of digestion of proteins, carbohydrates, and

lipids

• The principal site of absorption of the products of digestion of

all three categories of foodstuffs, as well as vitamins, minerals,
and water.
Hindgut

• The second segment of the intestines, “large” intestine

• Store wastes between defecations

• Complete the absorption of needed water and minerals from

the gut contents prior to elimination.
To facilitate processing of food, 7L per day in humans
Two More Components

• The pancreas secretes many digestive enzymes into the

midgut.

• The biliary system, which is a part of the liver, secretes bile,

which plays a crucial emulsifying role in the digestion of lipids.
Muscular Action

• Smooth muscles: an outer layer of longitudinal muscles that

shorten, and an inner layer of circular muscles that constrict

• Peristalsis, a “wave” of constriction propelling material

• Segmentation, constrictions of circular muscles appear and

disappear in patterns that push the gut contents back and forth

• Enteric nervous system

Hydrolytic Enzymes

• Digestion is carried out mostly by hydrolytic enzymes

• Act in three spatial contexts in animals

1. Intraluminal enzymes, extracellular digestion
2. Membrane-associated enzymes, extracellular digestion
3. Intracellular enzymes, intracellular digestion
Carbohydrate Digestion

• Disaccharidases are membrane-associated enzymes found in

the apical membranes of the midgut epithelium

• Polysaccharide → disaccharides or oligosaccharides →

monosaccharides

• Cellulose by symbioses; chitin by some; starch and glycogen by

most, amylase
Protein Digestion
• A much larger array of enzymes, endopeptidases and exopeptidases

• Synthesized in inactive forms as proenzymes or zymogens

• Begins in stomach by pepsins, intraluminal

• In midgut, further intraluminal digestion and then membrane-

associated digestion (free amino acids, dipeptides, and tripeptides)

• Completed by intracellular peptidases (the di- and tripeptides)

Lipid Digestion

• Depends on enzymes and the emulsifying processes, which

break up lipids into small droplets having lots of surface area
relative to their lipid content.

• Intraluminal pancreatic lipases, act at lipid–water interfaces

• Bile salts and other bile constituents are amphipathic

molecules, can be recycled.
Absorption

• In human physiology, absorption is defined to be the transfer of

products of digestion from the lumen of the gastrointestinal tract
to the blood or lymph. (Digestion precedes absorption)

• Generally, absorption (assimilation) is the process of taking

organic compounds into the living tissues of an animal from the
gut lumen or from other places outside those tissues.
Surface Area

• Expanded by the presence of folds and

projections, and huge numbers of minute
fingerlike projections, intestinal villi
(singular villus)

• More digestive-absorptive epithelia cells

(with microvilli)
Transport
• Simple diffusion, facilitated
diffusion, and secondary active
transport
• Monosaccharides, amino acids,
and water-soluble vitamins
• At least 7 distinct transporter for
free amino acids
• Rapid turn over
Major Steps in Fatty Acid Absorption
Gut lumen Simple diffusion of Villus
Bile salt
fatty acids into cell interior

Fatty acid
Micelle
Triacylglycerols
formed

Glycerol
Secretion by
Chylomicrons Golgi apparatus
formed via vesicles
Protein

Chylomicrons

Triacylglycerol
Lipid Absorption

• Fatty acids and monoglycerides by simple diffusion

• Solubilization by formation of micelles (in lumen, not absorbed)

and lipoprotein molecular aggregates (intracellular,
chylomicrons)

• Short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs), both water-soluble and lipid-

soluble, absorbed wherever they are produced in the gut
Responses to Eating

• Voluntary swallowing →involuntary

wave of peristalsis

• Sphincters (tonic circular muscle)

at the two ends of the esophagus

• Upper stomach relax to store food

G Cells

• Endocrine cell

• Gastrin (a polypeptide hormone)

• The lower (final) part of the stomach

• Stimulated by the mechanical and

chemical effects of food in the
stomach
The Pyloric Sphincter

• Only a metered amount passes into

the midgut

• most of the material refluxed back

• Secretin, cholecystokinin (CCK), and
gastric inhibitory polypeptide (GIP) by
acidity and by exposure to nutrient
molecules.

• Secretin stimulates the pancreas to

–
secret bicarbonate (HCO3 )

• CCK and secretin work synergistically

• Segmentation is the principal type of

midgut motility