The Different Types of Carbohydrates

Digestion of carbohydrates starts with salivary amylase in the mouth, is largely paused in the stomach and then continues in the small intestine. For proteins, it's a two stage process. It's denatured and chopped up into smaller segments in the stomach. And then those smaller segments are broken down into individual amino acids in thesmall intestine and then absorbed. Water is mostly absorbed by the large intestine. Vitamins are small organic molecules which cannot be synthesized. Those are absorbed, particularly in the large intestine because some of them are produced by intestinal flora. We'll talk more about vitamins when we get to the episode on nutrition.