Cracked Light Sculpture
ELI5: Can someone explain how what happens when you consume sugar? I hear terms like Glucose, Insulin, some gets transferred to fat cells etc etc
I just want to know what happens when our body consumes sugar or carbs. I am looking to choose a diet that will make me live longer. I heard eating a day and picking a Keto diet will do that.
Criperio: FYI, eating healthier doesn’t equate to living longer. If you want to live longer then eat bland foods with the basic requirements to survive, and NEVER eat any more than you need to survive. The more you eat beyond minimum, the increased chance you’ll die earlier.
It seems odd, but there actually is reason behind this concept. Basically, the more often your body runs reactions to to breakdown materials (anything you eat) and create things from the stuff you ate, the more likely your body will accidentally damage itself from these reactions.
If you want to read more into this, take a look at the major signaling molecule mTOR and also free radical production.
Lendari: When you eat carbohydrates (sugar, starch or whole grains) it is digested into a chemical called glucose which is absorbed into your blood-stream. Your body uses this glucose as a source of energy. If the body can’t immediately use all the glucose, it will cause the pancreas to secrete a hormone called insulin which in turn causes your fat cells to rapidly remove the glucose from the blood-stream and store it as new body fat. Later, when your blood sugar levels start to drop again, the pancreas will secrete a different hormone called glucagon which causes the body to reverse the process and break body fat back down into glucose again.
The Atkin’s diet works by limiting the intake of carbohydrates to around 20-50g per day. When you restrict your carbohydrate levels this much, it’s very hard for your body to store fat. The body will actually change its entire metabolic process to one that uses fat instead of glucose as the primary source of energy. So Atkin’s is an extremely effective way to rapidly lose weight.
Keto is a variant of Atkin’s that offers similar advice about minimal carb intake but recognizes that fiber, while technically a carbohydrate isn’t digested into glucose in humans. So Keto allows you to ignore carbohydrates from fiber which is important because Atkins diets are known to cause constipation. A common joke told by Atkin’s dieters is that on Atkin’s they could eat bacon for every meal, which is obviously a bad idea for a long-term diet. Keto offers better guidance about the ratio of protein to fat intake and emphasizes healthier saturated fats over unsaturated fats clarifying some of the edge cases around eating very narrow and unsustainable diets like the all-bacon-diet. So if you compared Atkins and keto you can think of Atkin’s as the original, focused on rapid short-term results, and keto as the version 2.0 focused more on long-term sustainability without sacrificing results.
Check out /r/keto for stories from people who completely turned their lives around by following a high-fat, low-carb diet. It is truly amazing seeing some of the pictures people post there.
UhhMaybeNot: There are two (main) ways of holding energy for a living thing: sugar and fat. In general, plants hold energy in sugar and animals in fat. When you eat sugar, the energy is either used quickly or it’s transferred into fat.
at least i think that’s a simplified version obviously