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Asked by mcot to Adam, Catherine, Karen, Leila, Nazim on 15 Mar 2012.
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Karen Masters answered on 13 Mar 2012:
It’s fuel for our bodies. That’s how I think of it anyway. We need energy to move around and do stuff.
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Catherine Rix answered on 13 Mar 2012:
our bodies are using energy all the time, even when we are sleeping. We need energy to make our muscles work, including the heart which needs to pump blood round our body all the time. We get our energy from eating and drinking.
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Adam Stevens answered on 13 Mar 2012:
Food and drink provides all the building blocks of our cells. We need things like proteins to build up pieces of the cells that die (they are being replaced all the time), water to put inside them.
As well as that, like Karen and Catherine say, the cells also need fuel to allow them to work – a lot of food contains carbohydrates that get broken down into glucose, which the cells can use for respiration.
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Leila Battison answered on 13 Mar 2012:
Plants don’t have to eat, because they can make their own food from sunlight, during photosynthesis. They are called ‘producers’. But they still have to drink, by sucking water up through their roots.
We can’t do photosynthesis (though it would be awesome if we could) so we have to get the energy by eating other things, making us ‘consumers’.
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Nazim Bharmal answered on 15 Mar 2012:
Partly it is energy for our bodies, but we also need the nutrients to remake our bodies, and water because we, errr, “get rid of it” when we go to the toilet.
I suppose an analogy with a car is going to the garage, putting in petrol (the energy), some oil (the water because oil leaks from cars), and fitting a new part (the nutrients).
A few tiny animals are clever and live in symbiotic relationships with plants: the plants live inside them and produce the food the animals need, and they live in water so don’t have to find water either. But these animals are quite dull, perhaps because they are so lazy? 🙂
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