What is Entropy? How good (%) are you at avoiding it in the breakdown of your food?

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Biology

Dominique Boyd

1 November, 10:01

What is Entropy? How good (%) are you at avoiding it in the breakdown of your food?

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Chace Garrison · Answer 1

Entropy is the measure of the disorder or randomness in a system. In other words, if you drop a box of matches on the floor, the matches will fall all over the place, which is an increase in entropy.

For an example of decreased entropy, if you build a house you are making order, not chaos, so the entropy-the disorder of a system-is decreased

When we eat food we will use the energy and the nutrients in the food to increase the order within the body so we basically decrease the entropy of our body. There is a mechanism going on while the breakdown of our food during digestion and chewing. During this process, chemical energy is stored in the form of energy packets called ATP. So, the storage of energy is more ordered process therefore overall entropy of body is decreases during food breakdown.

The more food we take in the more we decrease the entropy of our body. The key is that our body is not an isolated system. Our body interacts with the world around us. While my entropy may go down, the entropy of the larger world goes up.