Carbohydrates that escape digestion

Carbohydrates that Escape Digestion 139 TABLE 3.1 Change of Starch and Sugar Content of Bananas during Ripening... 

Undigestible carbohydrates, or those which escape digestion, pass into the large bowel, where they are exposed to the profuse and various bacterial types that normally inhabit that region. A certain amount of additional monosaccharide may be formed there and perhaps absorbed. 

Digestion of food changes the matrix in which the chemical resides as lipids, carbohydrates, and proteins are absorbed. Because hydrophobic organic chemicals have the highest affinity for these components of the food, the removal of these food components, as a result of digestion, causes the chemical activity in the food to increase (Gobas et al., 1993, 1999). This increase in chemical activity can be viewed as an increase in the chemical s potential to escape from the food phase, as expressed by the chemical s fugacity, which is effectively the partial pressure that the chemical exerts and is expressed in units of pres-... 

The intestinal flora contains, furthermore, a series of non-pathogenic micro-organisms which, by the production of enzymes acting on the carbohydrates, the fats, or the albuminoids, contribute to the digestion of the foods which have escaped the action of the gastric and pancreatic secretions. Before the part played by these latter microbes became known it was at one time even believed that their aid was indispensable to animal life. 

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