Diet And Digestion

A teenager, a pregnant woman and a manual labourer sitting down to the same meal do not actually need the same meal. Age, pregnancy, climate and the physical demands of a job all change how much energy and which nutrients a body requires, and getting the balance wrong for long enough produces a recognisable deficiency disease with its own set of symptoms. This topic builds the full picture: what a balanced diet supplies, how the alimentary canal breaks food down into absorbable molecules, and how the small intestine is engineered to get those molecules into the blood as efficiently as possible.

You will also meet the practical side of nutrition that Human Biology students are expected to reason about: calculating and interpreting BMI, linking obesity and high cholesterol to specific diseases, and knowing why hygienic food preparation matters at every stage from the kitchen to the gut. Expect calculation questions, structure-to-function reasoning and at least one question that asks you to identify a deficiency disease from a described set of symptoms.