Question

Digestion of food is an example of ………...change.

Answer 1

Hint: Digestion is a process from which we can digest our food. Food is an essential substance for living beings. You can answer this question by thinking of reactants, which is food changing to products to give us energy. Now try to answer this question accordingly.

Complete step by step answer:
Digestion is considered a physical and chemical change because enzymes in the stomach and intestines break down large macromolecules into simpler molecules so that the body can more easily absorb the food.

Explanation of the statement:
The digestion processes involve changing the composition of materials (food) by chemical interactions – changes in bonding, oxidation states, and structure – of the materials with other chemicals (enzymes, acids) in our digestive tracts.
Digestion (assuming you are asking the human digestive system) is a combination of mechanical and chemical processes. The main goal is to let the ingredients of the food decay to smaller, absorb-able molecules and then separate it from the "rest".
To support this, the food is mechanically cut to as small pieces as possible (chewing), and chemical reactions induced by both high pH and different enzymes from the saliva start working in the mouth.
After the food enters the stomach and other parts of the digestive system, specialized enzymes, emulators, and the relatively extreme pH helps the hydrolyzation of carbohydrates, peptides, and lipids.

Therefore, we can say that the Digestion of food is an example of physical and chemical change.

Note: You should also know that a purely “physical change” does not change the composition of a material. So, water freezing to ice or boiling to steam is a physical change, not a chemical one. But reacting water with sodium to produce hydrogen and sodium hydroxide (different compounds from the original materials) is a chemical change.
Beside this chemical/physical process, there is a biochemical process, too: a wide range of microorganisms live in the digestive system, assisting with the undigested food, producing e.g. vitamins that the body can absorb.