Unit 5 Reflection

 "Unit 5 Reflection"

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This unit was about the Digestive System, Metabolism, Endocrine System, and Lymphatic System. The Digestive System includes the Alimentary Canal which is the pathway that the food goes from your mouth to being defecated. The picture to the left shows all of the organs in the Digestive/Alimentary Canal. The digestive system is responsible for absorbing, digesting, secreting, and defecating. We did one lab for this unit about the digestive system which I had a previous blogpost as well and that can be found here. In our metabolism there are three stages. Stage 1 breaks down large molecules to smaller ones. Stage 2 takes those small molecules and turns them into Acetyl CoA. Stage 3 has common pathways such as the Krebs cycle and ETC that are oxidation for the fuel molecules. Also, there are three different states.  The Fed state is right after you eat. The pancreas releases insulin and the majority of glucose is taken by the liver to be converted into glycogen. The fasting state is where the insulin levels drop and the glucagon levels rise. The body also uses more fats for energy in order to conserve the glucose. The last state is the Starvation state. This occurs 4-5 days after eating where the muscles rely on adipose tissues for fuel. The Endocrine System controls the processes involved in movement and physiological equilibrium. There are many different glands such as the pituitary gland, the thyroid gland, and the parathyroid gland that are involved in this system. Some organs that are in the endocrine system are the pancreas, which secretes insulin or glucagon; gonads, which are either testes or ovaries that deal with testosterone or estrogen; and the kidneys, which regulate red blood cell production. The last system that we learned about in this unit was the Lymphatic System which specializes in immunity, lipid absorption, and fluid recovery. There are three different kinds of lymphocytes. T-cells, which you ca read more about here from my previous posts, deal with cellular immunity. Then there are b-cells for humoral immunity, and Natural Killer cells which provides immunological surveillance.

I think that this unit was very fascinating but it was a little bit difficult for me to keep up with all the new information. I really enjoy human anatomy and learning about the body, but when there is so much information to learn in a relatively short amount of time, it can be slightly daunting.

Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed it!
Amanda

Digestive System Lab

Digestive Organ	Length (cm)
Mouth	9.7 cm
Esophagus	42 cm
Stomach	19 cm
Small Intestine	721.36 cm
Large Intestine	180.34 cm
TOTAL	972.4 cm

For this activity, we measured the approximate lengths of each of the organs in our digestive system. For the mouth, we measured from our jaw to the front of our mouth. the esophagus was measured by going from our jaw to the end of our rib cage. The stomach was approximated by taking the length of the space between the thumb and pinky when the hand was stretched out. For the small intestine, we had to convert our height into centimeters and then multiply by 4. Lastly, the large intestine length was found my just taking our height in centimeters. This was an interesting way to figure out how long each organ was. The total length of my digestive system is almost 5 1/2 times the size of my height. This is a serious difference and it is amazing to think that all it would be able to fit in my body just by wrapping and coiling around. I would guess that, on average, it would take about 18 hours for food to move through my entire digestive system. In looking it up, the actual time is 24-72 hours. This makes sense considering people don't defecate every day, as my prediction would suggest. Some factors that may influence the time that it takes to pass through the whole digestive system are that the stomach needs time to break down the food, the bolus has to wind around 9 meters of organs, and in the process, many nutrients and other things are extracted from it on the way. Many muscles are used in this process to make the food used to its full potential. Digestion is different from absorption because digestion is the process of breaking down the food whereas absorption is taking in or soaking up substances or energy. The stomach and the small intestine are involved in the process of digestion, and the large intestine is involved mainly with the absorption aspect. The small intestine does help with absorption as well as digestion.

New Years Goals

New Years Goals

1) My goal for the school year is to get better grades on tests in this class:

• study further in advance
• ask for help from friends 
• go into tutorial to ask clarifying questions to the teacher

2) I would like to use my time more wisely:

• getting important things that I need to do before I do things for fun. 
• I need to have my down time be as a reward for my hard work. 
• get it done during the school week so that i can have the weekend to be more relaxed to get ready for another school week

3) Eat healthier and workout more often:

• set aside some time to workout each day 
• plan out more healthy meals that i will eat during the weekend