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The majority of protein digestion occurs in the stomach and takes about 4-6 hours.

It is difficult to say whether the stomach or small intestine does most of the digestion of proteins because they each play an important role in two different phases of digestion. The stomach uses enzymes and acids to breakdown larger protein molecules and the small intestine, duodenum, uses different enzymes to break the protein down to amino acids where it can be absorbed into the blood stream.

If I were to pick which one is more important, I would pick the duodenum because without it even if the stomach did its part the particles would be too big to be absorbed and so eliminated from the body without being utilized. So I would say that the most important part of protein digestion occurs in the small intestine and not the stomach. After all, there are many people walking around today with a gastric bypass which essentially means they are living without a stomach. And just the opposite, there is no one walking around without a duodenum.

To correctly answer this question using the technical definition of digestion which is the breakdown and absorption of nutrients, the final absorption of complex proteins take longer than the short stopover they make in the stomach, it can take an additional 24, 48, or even 72 hours, or three days for all of the usable protein to be absorbed through the lining of the small intestine, depending on what else is in there and how fast or slow the digestive system is moving.

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11y ago

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