"The Chemistry of Living Things"

[Kylie Warner]

Throughout the last few weeks of class, I’ve learned so much. From notes to our class discussions, so many things have been brought to my attention and changed my prospective on biology. Not only about the carbohydrates, lipids, and proteins but about how misleading the media is and how uninformed people are about their health, including myself.

One thing that I learned and that played a major part in the rest of the unit was I did not know that carbohydrates are sugars. I’m not sure what I thought they were, I just knew that they were in lots of food and made your hips pop out, at least that’s what I thought I knew. But I learned that that was only a misconception and as a result, it was an aha! Moment for me. I’ve always grown up under the consumption that if you eat carbs but then don’t run to lose them, you’re going to get bigger. It never occurred to me that you’re body is constantly burning carbs. So for me that was a learning moment because running and dieting help, but your body is always breaking up food inside. Before class I knew about monosaccarides and disaccarides but learning how simple sugars turn into double sugars through dehydration synthesis was something that helped me understand the concept.

I never knew that starch was a carbohydrate. I liked learning and making the graphs of how starch in your body can make it run a lot longer and there’s no crash as opposed to sugar because I always thought that if you just eat or drink a bunch of sugar, you’ll be good to go, forgetting about the crash when your body has reached its peak.
Lipids, I think, were always confusing for me. When we made the chart at the very beginning of this unit, I said that lipids were fats and that’s all I knew about them. I learned through this that a lipid itself is it’s own topic. Fatyacids are lipids which I never knew. But once I did, I couldn’t grasp what they actually were. It was easy to figure out what carbohydrates were because we see them everyday and I eat them everyday like table sugar. But wrapping my head around what a fatyacid was, was so difficult. At the beginning of this section, we learned that lipids, like carbohydrates, had the compound CH2O but there is very little oxygen. So an aha! Moment was when we drew the long chains for fatyacids and made the polar side with oxygen and the other side with out the oxygen and it was non-polar. It became so easy for me to picture the chains and to grasp what fatyacids are. I learned that lipids can have a double bond in their chains when they are missing two hydrogen in them and when there are more than one double bonds, it is called poly-saturated when there are more than one double bond.

I also think that it’s interesting that not only are lipids fat, but they are waxes, oils, and steroids. Things click when talking about this in class because one thing that all these have in common is that they are all water resistant. When disaccarides are created it’s because water was taken out of compounds to build something else. But there is not a lot of oxygen in lipids, so it’s hard to have water. Waxes are long fatyacids chains with alcohol attached, so they are very water resistant.

Here's a picture of a trigyceride. This is a polymer and the fatty acids are the monomer, the repeating unit.

One thing about this class that I learn the most is the diction used. I hear things like saturated fatyacids sometimes on T.V. and have no idea what they are. I learn in this class and pick up fast on the vocabulary because I see proof that we could actually use this in real life. Things that have appeared a lot on quizzes and frequently on notes are the polymers, which is a compound made up of repeated linked units and a monomers, the repeating unit in a polymer. This was one thing that I struggled with greatly. So when Mrs. Nash explained that in a Lego model, the model would be the polymer and the Legos would be the monomer because they are what made up the model, it was like the lights clicked on. That was another aha! Moment in class. I’ve learned so much and was surprised but how uninformed I was and, I’m sure, still am about the basic necessities of my health. I think by being in the class so far, I have watched what I have ate and not been so gullible to advertisements that say: NO CARBS, when there were never any carbs there to begin with.