Question

How does surface area relate to digestion?

Answer 1

Hint: Digestion is the break-up into small water-soluble food molecules of large insoluble food molecules so that they can be absorbed into the plasma of the watery blood. These smaller substances of certain species are ingested into the bloodstream through the small intestine.

Complete answer:
The rate of digestion increases as the surface area increases. The explanation for this is that the mechanism that accelerates and supports the number of enzymes in digestion. And this is one of the enzyme individuals that function more effectively on larger surfaces. This implies that when supplied with a greater surface region, an enzyme can accelerate a chemical reaction more quickly, so the digestion process is also sped up.
Mechanical food digestion in which the food is broken down into smaller chunks increases the surface area for enzyme action and thereby facilitates chemical digestion by breaking down the food by enzymes into simpler nutrients (so that they can be absorbed).
Chewing breaks the small into the big. The mechanical digestion of food in the mouth involves the transformation into smaller fragments of bite-sized bits of food. This has the effect of growing the food particles' surface area and enabling saliva to be thoroughly mixed with them.
Saliva is a watery fluid that includes mucin, a slick material that lubricates the food for better swallowing, as well as an enzyme called amylase that digests starch. Any starch found in the food is then readily exposed to amylase when chewed, speeding up the process of digestion. Surface area increases as particle size decreases for a given bite-sized piece of food.

Note:
The presence of several finger-like projections called villi is due to a wide area of the surface. The good supply of blood across the villi rapidly takes away ingested nutrients, maintaining a steep concentration gradient so that there can be further diffusion of digested nutrients into the blood from the small intestine.