Dr. Diego Bohórquez

Not only the chemical compounds, but also an area that I think that is going to be fascinating in the future is the mechanical distinction plus the adjustment in temperature.

as the chyme starts to flow from the mouth into the colon.

Like, for instance, I heard this from a bioengineer not long ago that was engineering artificial gut and a stomach.

And he shared with me a piece of information that I was not aware of, that the esophagus has to adjust the temperature of the food very rapidly within seconds into physiological temperature of the inside of the body.

So if we're having hot coffee, within a couple of seconds, it has to be at the physiological temperature of the body by the time that it gets into the stomach, right?

And all of that happens very rapidly.

Amazing.

So here I'm going to give you something that will get your gut churning, so to speak.

So these cells have to make sense not only of the molecule that had been adjusted, meaning the chemistry of the molecule.

Let's say it's glucose.

It has to make sense a little bit of the taste.

Is it sweet?

Is it bitter?

Then it has to take into account how much of the molecule is absorbed inside of the cell.

So that's the second layer of integration.

Then once the cell has eaten that molecule, so to speak, then that molecule will be digested inside of the cell to release ATP or some other compound.

ATP is for energy, for instance.

That has also have to be taken into account, for instance, in glucose.

Glucose activates the TAS1R3, which is a sweet taste receptor.

Then the glucose is absorbed by some of the sodium glucose transporters, which are active transporters.