Week 4 Reflection

This week,my aim is to find out the importance of a nutritional and healthy diet. Healthy eating is not about strict nutrition philosophies, staying thin, or keeping away from the food you love. In fact, it’s about enjoying yourself,having more energy but still stay as healthy as possible. This can be possible by learning some nutrition basics and using them in a way that works for you. Choose food that is beneficial to you and stay away from food that increase the risk of illnesses such as diabetes,heart disease and cancer.

Week 3 Reflection

I have just finished constructing my graph according to the data I have recorded.I have started researching on my learning targets as I have actually finished my project earlier then expected.

Parts of the digestive system and the functions

Mouth

Physical and chemical digestions take place in the mouth. The teeth break down food into smaller pieces to increase the surface area of the food exposed to enzymes. Saliva is produced by the salivary glands. Saliva contains the digestive enzyme,amylase, which breaks down starch in the food into maltose, a type of sugar. The tongue helps to mix the food with the saliva and rolls the partially digested food into a small ball(bolus) which is then swallowed into the oesophagus(gullet).

Oesophagus(gullet)
The oesophagus(gullet) is a long narrow tube joining the mouth and the stomach.When is food is swallowed, it does not 'drop' into the stomach as one might have imagined because of the force of gravity.In fact, the oesophagus has strong muscles in its walls.These muscles help to push the food down into the stomach by contracting and relaxing.

Stomach
The stomach is a muscular bag.The muscles contract and churn the food to mix it with a digestive juice called gastric juice.The proteases in the gastric juice digest the proteins in the food and the remaining food would turn into a thick mass of semi-liquid also known as chyme.The chyme would then move to the small intestine after a few hours.

Small Intestine
The small intestine is where most of the digestion and absorption of food takes place.The pancreas produces pancreatic juices and the small intestine,intestinal juices.Amylase from the pancreas breaks down starch into maltose.Maltese from the walls of the small intestine further breaks it down into glucose.The large surface area enables small food molecules from the digested food to be absorbed quickly.

Large Intestine
The undigested food moves from the small intestine to the large intestine through peristalsis.There are different types of bacteria living in the large intestine but most are harmless.Some are beneficial as they make vitamins required by the body.Cells linig the large intestine absorb these vitamins as well as mineral salts and excess water.A mixture of undigested food and dead bacteria are known as faeces and is temporarily stored in the rectum.Mostly the muscles of the rectum are contracted.Only when the muscles between the rectum and anus relax,will the faeces then be passed out of the body.This is know as defaecation.

Week 2 Reflection

This time,I have drawn a frequency table to calculate the how often I eat each type of food. From my frequency table,I can see that most of my meals consist of food from the Meat and Alternatives group and the Rice and Alternatives group and that only a very small part of my meals had vegetables in them. During this process,I had some trouble,I accidentally deleted my meal log so I had to create another one. Fortunately,creating another meal log doesn't take much time.Otherwise,that would be disastrous.

Week 1 Reflection

For this week,i have done a meal log for a period of 4 days.I found out that I wasn't really eating healthy food.A balanced diet should consist of an adequate amount of fruits and vegetables,whole grains and of course lean meat and fish.I have learned to lessen my consumption of fatty and oily food as that may result in me being obese or diabetic.Based on the data that I have recorded, my diet is really different from the example taken from the Health Promotion Board website.My diet didn't even include any fruits, only a small amount of vegetables, grilled fish and lastly fried chicken. From an article that I have read from the internet,I have also learnt that eating too much cold and raw food may lead to weak digestion. This is just the beginning of my project, I am really glad that I have not faced any difficulties so far.

My learning targets

Learning targets:

What actually makes up the digestive system?

The functions of the parts?

What is the importance of a nutritional and healthy diet?

Are there different types of digestion?

What is hydrochloric acid?

What is bile?

What are proteases?