Welcome to the stomach household!
When you hear the word digestion, the most prominent organ that comes up in your head would be your stomach.
A lot of things are secreted from the stomach, as it has to help turn big bulks of food into a liquid mush thing called chyme.
How does it do it? Well if you imagine the stomach being a house for various people (cells and enzymes) like so:
The stomach has something called chief cell which releases pepsinogen, an inactive enzyme. The enzyme is then activated when it *reacts* with acid and is converted into a functional pepsin,a protease.
There are also G cells that produce gastrin. (My G produces gastrin)
Gastrin stimulates parietal cells in the stomach to produce acid and intrinsic factor.
Mucous is produced with bicarbonate which neutralises the acid to reduce the damage the acid can cause.
Acid is useful as it sterilises the stuff it gets
Initrinsic factor aids the absorption of B12
Gastric lipase is also produced by chief cells and with lingual lipase they are the only two acidic lipases produced.
