We have/had to sign up for our favorite biomolecules today and, quite honestly, I really don’t know much about anything except nucleic acids (from research/genetics) and proteins (from cell physiology). So I decided to put in a little research before I made my choices, and it got me thinking about food.
Food, when you really think about it, is very, very weird. I am distinctly aware of this fact every time I go to the dining halls and realize that I’d rather start being anorexic than eat there. There’s a quote from a TV show I once saw that I really liked. This is going to be terribly cited, because I can neither remember the TV show name (it ran for only one season and was about a teenaged girl who made a new friend and dyed her hair red) nor the actual quote, but it went something like this: “Have you ever thought about chewing? Like, what it really is? And people that do it all the time, in public!”1 Like the rest of the season, this comment was funny because of how true it is. Chewing is weird. And, as it turns out, so are proteins, carbohydrates, lipids and nucleic acids.
The concept is simple, but before today, I had never really thought about exactly why we eat or what it does for our bodies. I had heard, of course, about ATP and energy storage, etc., etc., but I hadn’t really taken the time to consider the fact that as I put a piece of meat into my mouth I am tearing apart the tissue down to it amino acid composition and then reorganizing all of those amino acids into my own proteins.Literally. I am the chicken that I put in my mouth when I was 5. Or, at least, a part of me could be. (The same is true for our nucleic acids.)
In this vein, carbohydrates are a little more palatable (no pun intended). We eat the carbohydrates, we break them down into useable saccharides, and then we release the energy into NADH and ATP. (AP Biology is all coming back to me!) No weird chicken-is-me pseudo reality.
But lipids, which don’t even dissolve in water, are equally strange. Have you ever considered what it must be like for your body when you digest a saturated lipid that’s solid at room temperature? Where should it go? Not only will it not simply dissolve in, it won’t even liquify if you put it too close to the surface! Ugh. How odd.
In any case, I am very excited for all that we will discover about these biomolecules in the coming months. I hope to be appropriately disturbed each time I sit down for a meal. Bon appetit!
1Fun aside: In trying to find my chewing quote, I came across a Wiki How on How to Chew Gum in Class (in 15 steps). Check it out: http://www.wikihow.com/Chew-Gum-in-Class.
Coincidentally, the article immediately below in my Google search was “Why Chewing Gum Destroys Your Health” (s ee http://foodbabe.com/2011/12/09/wanna-a-piece-of-gum/), which continues the conversation of food to the topic of the food industry, and my thought “is what we are putting in our mouths actually classifiable as food, or at least something we would like to eat?” Hopefully I’ll have more of this to come in future blog posts!