Lipase
Slices fats into fatty acids.
Workbench
- Works on
- Fats (triglycerides)
- Leaves
- Fatty acids and monoglycerides
- Made by
- Mostly your pancreas.
- Works in
- Small intestine (from the pancreas), after bile breaks the fat into droplets.
- Sound
- SLICE!
On the bench
Lipase (Pizza cutter)
A triglyceride: one glycerol backbone, three fatty-acid tails
Pick a link and cut it with the pizza cutter.
How it works
Most of the fat in food is triglyceride: three fatty-acid tails hooked onto a small backbone called glycerol. Fat doesn’t mix with water, so lipase can only get at the outside of a blob.
That’s why bile goes first and breaks blobs into tiny droplets. Then lipase from the pancreas slices off the two outer tails and leaves the middle one attached: two fatty acids and a monoglyceride, ready to absorb.
AnnouncerThe pizza cutter is a metaphor. Please do not put butter on a pizza cutter.
Lipase works at the surface of fat. Bile’s whole job is to make more surface.
Butter
Egg yolk
The rest of the kit
Amylase
Alpha-galactosidase
Bromelain
PapainSome food has no tool at all. That’s the buffet.
Coming up next on Channel GG
Lactase
Opens up milk sugar (lactose).
