Remember that sandwich you had for lunch? The bread from the sandwich is made up of many macomolecules known as carbohydrates which are made up of known sugars. Different types of sugars exist and one common one is glucose. When we chew, enzymes in our mouth start to break down the carbohydrates in our food. The particles travel through your body's gestational tract until they reach your stomach. Inside your stomach, your food gets broken down into its simple components of proteins, sugars, and amino acids. Glucose in your food gets absorbed by your body via your blood stream. Your blood then delivers the glucose to all the different cells of your body. With the help of the chemical hormone, insulin, glucose diffuses out of your blood and gets absorbed into the cells. There, once the glucose is in a cell's cytoplasm, it undergoes glycolysis where it gets broken down even further into two small pyruvate molecules. From here, the molecules go through a process known as the TCA or Krebs cycle which is a mix of oxidation-reduction reactions that transfer electrons to electron carriers. These carriers harness energy in the form of NADH and FADH2. During this process, a small amount of ATP (energy for your cell) gets produced. The electron carriers deliver their electrons to the mitochondria of the cell to directly produce more amounts of ATP. The ATP then gets used for energy that the cell can use to keep your body going all day long :)
Wednesday, May 9, 2012
Glucose: a powerhouse of energy
If I had to explain how glucose is ultimately used for energy in our bodies, it would go something like this...
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