Love Your Liver
More A Sweet Life Aug 21, 2011, 7:58 pm
It’s been over 40 years now but I can still remember the plaintive cry of my father,” How can this be?!!? I ate nothing today. NOTHING!!!” He was talking about his blood sugar, of course. His diagnosis with type
2 diabetes was old news by that time and he did what his doctors told him: watch what you eat and measure your blood sugar regularly. An extensive clinical study (called the Diabetes Control and Complications Trial) which spanned 10 years and followed thousands of patients, demonstrated conclusively that high blood glucose is the major factor determining the likelihood of complications. Of course, it is the complications that destroy our health. Blood glucose acts like rust, eating away at body parts in characteristic ways. Clearly, then, it follows that if a patient keeps his or her blood glucose levels low, the chances of developing life destroying diabetes complications is vastly reduced. Indeed, one way to control blood glucose is to watch that you eat. Foods high in sugar are going to put lots of glucose in the blood. Even with insulin injections, the ability to get that glucose absorbed quickly is impaired in diabetic patients as compared to healthy individuals. This is only the beginning of the story, however.
To really understand the non-dietary sources of glucose we need to consider the ebb and flow of metabolism. Specifically we need to consider energy storage and release. The most famous molecule in metabolism is adenosine triphosphate (ATP). You’ll even find it advertised in sports energy drinks. The energy of ATP is found in the chemical bonds linking phosphorous and oxygen (phosphate = PO4). ATP is made in the mitochondria, of which, there are several thousand per cell. Glucose is easily converted to ATP, hence our ability to perk up when we cat a candy bar. Besides glucose, other molecules
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Tags: glucose, blood, complications, diabetes, sugar, energy, ability, need, metabolism, control, course, watch, years, patients,
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- Description: You do not just get blood glucose from your diet. You also make it. This can be a big problem for the diabetic patient.
