CHEMICAL REACTIONS INDICATOR

Recognizes the importance of chemical reactions that occur in your body and
in the environment.
Chemical reactions in your body are the entire reason your body is able to keep on working.

Imagine you are driving a car that can’t stop and you are constantly repairing the car with
random scrap you find as you drive. That is essentially what your body does. It constantly
repairs itself with stuff you give it, whether it be organic materials, like lipids(fats), amino
acids(proteins), nucleic acids, or sugars(simple sugars like glucose(table sugar) and complex
sugars like starch).

In your body, you have billions of tiny “robots” known as enzymes, which catalyze, or speed up
the reactions in your body. You need this because of 2 main things.

most reactions that require you to stay alive take a very VERY long time without any actions.

you can’t technically use the raw materials you ingest. At least not in the form you ingest them
in.

Let me explain:

Think of when you were a kid, and you got that “sugar rush” when you ate candy, sweet baked
goods, or anything with alot of sugar. You didn’t get that explosion of energy straight from the
sugar crystals. You got that burst of energy because your body broke the chemical bonds
holding those sugars together. Take glucose, or table sugar, for example. It’s extremely
energy-rich. However, in the sugar form, all the energy is stored in the chemical bonds. In this
form, it is stable to some degree, but it can be brought to an even more energy-poor state, this
being carbon dioxide and water, both of which are exhaled from your body when you breathe.

Over millennia of evolution, your body has learned to exploit this process; breaking down high
energy molecules into lower-energy products. In terms of sugar, this “energy harvesting”
happens inside your cells, specifically, starting in the cytoplasm of the cell, then moving to the
mitochondria. This process isn’t simple either. First, the glucose must be broken down by
various enzymes to a 3 carbon molecule called pyruvate, which then is oxidized, or having
electrons stripped off of it, removed 1 carbon atom, releasing 1 molecule of carbon dioxide,
and remodified with a co-enzyme in the mitochondrial matrix called acetyl-coenzyme A, which
is then added into the citric acid(or krebs cycle) which then adds the Acetyl-coenzyme A to a
molecule of oxaloacetate to create a citric acid molecule, which then is used to “recharge”
certain molecules like FADH2, GTP and NADH, which I will be referring as the “battery
molecules” for reasons that you will see next, by adding electrons and/or phosphate groups
onto them, bringing them to higher energy states than they were before.
This is actually only half of the story too. The new recharged “battery molecules” are then
brought to the edges of the inner membrane, where they are stripped of the electrons,
“draining” the batteries of their energy and thus allowing them to be recharged through the
Krebs cycle. The electrons are then used to energize various proteins to allow them to create a
concentration gradient of protons, or hydrogen ions, between the inner membrane and the
outer membrane of the mitochondria, with the final electron acceptors being oxygen
molecules that you breathe in, which then bond with the electrons and hydrogen ions to make
water(only reason why you need oxygen is for this process, known as oxidative
phosphorylation) which you then breathe out.

ok wow. that was a lot. And remember, none of this happens without help. You need chemical
reactions every step of the way just to push this reaction along, otherwise, nothing would
interact. Afterall, sugar doesn’t spontaneously combust in flames, and yet the energy it
releases when burned is 611.8546845 kcal/mole. However, you don’t die of heatstroke when
you eat a piece of rock candy because it is a controlled reaction, meaning not all the energy is
released at once, and because you don’t get all that energy in the form of ATP or GTP, which
are the molecules that allow you to do work such as make muscles, divide cells to make new
cells, and break down more sugar to make more atp and gtp, amoung other things. With this in
mind, we need the enzymes in our body to hasten the pace at which chemical reactions take
place in order to keep us alive since most are too slow to maintain a living thing, something
that would be very detrimental if you are alive. However, the enzymes themselves are chemical
reactions too, stressing molecules at their weak points by having molecules attach to their
activation site which then makes it so less energy is required to break a certain bond in the
molecule, or binding with molecules, or even putting enough stress on the molecule to break
the molecule by itself. A single break in this elegant system often results in a malfunction,
which means less productivity. Truthfully, I actually simplified this way down; this process is
actually a lot more difficult than I explain here.

Plus, this is just one reaction chain that happens in your body. I haven’t even started on how
you digest food, the reactions in your stomach, how your neurons make you feel your
surroundings, how your brain and it’s neurons store information, how you repair muscles,
how you grow, etc. Every single one of these processes in the body is a long list of chemical
reactions, all of which start with the consumption of energy-rich molecules known as ATP and
GTP which are created through the system I just explain in brief detail, known as cellular
respiration.

In conclusion, chemical reactions are extremely important in the body because they are every
single action the body does. Every step you take, every meal you eat, every breath you breathe,
every memory you make: they are all chemical reactions; just an elegant line of atoms and
molecules playing the game of chemistry, with the pieces being the various atoms in your
body, the currency being energy, the rules being the molecular forces which tell them what
moves they can make, how they interact and what they can’t do, and the end goal and the
ultimate prize of making sure you are alive to read this message. Without your chemical
reactions, your body would be no different from your surroundings; just a pile of carbon,
hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur, iron, and various other atoms arranged in
molecules with no actions in between them.