The illustration above shows a small part of a starch molecule, highly magnified. It consists of glucose molecules bonded together end-to-end by chemical links called glycosidic bonds. The enzyme amylase, present in both saliva and intestinal juices, breaks every other bond, turning starch into maltose, which is, in turn, broken down to glucose by the enzyme maltase. Each starch molecule is eventually broken down to thousands of glucose molecules.
