(Originais Teachy 2024) - Question Hard of Sciences

During a classroom experiment, 6th-grade students decided to investigate the time it takes for different types of food to pass through a simulated human digestive system. The tested foods were a whole wheat bread and cheese sandwich (carbohydrates and proteins) and an apple slice (mainly carbohydrates and fibers). To simulate chewing, the foods were mashed into similar-sized pieces and mixed with a solution of water and digestive enzymes that mimics the action of saliva. From the observations made in the experiment, the students noticed that, despite being broken into smaller pieces, the sandwich and the apple did not completely mix at the beginning of the digestion process. Considering their knowledge about the human digestive system and the experiment conducted, discuss the relevance of the students' observation for understanding the digestion process and explain how the structure and action of digestive enzymes can act differently on the different components of these foods. Additionally, analyze how the interdisciplinary approach between Science and Mathematics could be applied to estimate the digestion time of each type of food based on known enzyme reaction rates.