1. Breaking Down the Meat

The process starts in your mouth with the mechanical digestion of food: Your teeth cut, tear, and mash the steak into smaller particles, mixing it with saliva to form a semisolid lump.

2. Digesting the Protein

Once swallowed, the pulverized beef moves down your esophagus and lands in your stomach. Here, enzymes such as pepsin chemically break the steak into strands of amino acids. The whole mess is now more of a liquid called chyme.

3. Creating Usable Parts

From your stomach, the chyme passes into your small intestines. Here, additional enzymes--trypsin and chymotrypsin—act on the amino acid strands to break them into even smaller parts, until only single and double amino acids remain.

4. Preparing for Delivery

The amino acids are then transported through the cells that line the walls of your intestines and into your bloodstream, a process called absorption. They're now ready to be sent to your muscles via your blood vessels.

5. Building the Muscle

Once they reach your muscles, amino acids are delivered to the cells by way of capillaries. There, the amino acids help repair damaged fibers. In fact, muscle-protein synthesis can't occur unless amino acids are readily available—all the more reason to eat some protein at every meal.

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