Digestion And Absorption

Question

During digestion of a fatty meal, bile salts released into the duodenum chiefly assist fat breakdown by performing which physical action on large fat globules?

RankGuru · Accepted Answer

Bile, produced by the liver and stored in the gall bladder, contains bile pigments and bile salts but no digestive enzymes. As described in NCERT Class 11, Chapter 16 (Digestion and Absorption), bile salts break large fat globules into a fine suspension of much smaller droplets, a process called emulsification. By increasing the total surface area exposed to lipase, emulsification greatly accelerates enzymatic fat digestion even though bile itself does not cleave any chemical bonds. Hydrolysis of ester bonds is the chemical job of pancreatic and intestinal lipase, not bile, so that option confuses an enzyme function with a physical one. Conversion of fats into glucose does not occur during digestion; fats yield fatty acids and glycerol, making that choice biochemically impossible. Activation of pepsinogen into pepsin is carried out by hydrochloric acid in the acidic stomach, an entirely different organ and pH from the alkaline duodenum where bile acts. A consistency check confirms the answer: bile works in the small intestine on fats by a surface-area mechanism, exactly matching emulsification rather than any enzymatic step.

Digestion And Absorption

Select the correct option:

🔒 Solution Hidden from View

More human physiology Practice Questions

A student observing the inner lining of the small intestine notes numerous finger-like projections; ...

Inactive trypsinogen secreted by the pancreas must be converted to active trypsin before protein dig...

Following a carbohydrate-rich meal, blood glucose rises sharply; the pancreatic hormone secreted to ...

Inside red blood cells carbon dioxide is converted to bicarbonate, and chloride ions move inward to ...

In a standard electrocardiogram recorded from a healthy individual, the QRS complex of the tracing p...

According to the sliding filament theory of muscle contraction, the observable shortening of a sarco...

The resting neuronal membrane maintains a particular distribution of ions, being relatively impermea...

Given that a heart ejects a stroke volume of 70 mL with each beat while beating 72 times every minut...

During the cross-bridge cycle in skeletal muscle, the regulatory protein that blocks myosin-binding ...

A fall in blood pressure within the afferent arteriole stimulates a specialised cellular complex of ...

A patient suffers from a progressive autoimmune disorder in which fatigue and weakness of skeletal m...

Considering that both kidneys together form filtrate at roughly 125 mL per minute, approximately wha...

About This Question

Solution