Getting To Know Glucose

What is diabetes? A question that keeps disturbing patients living with diabetes. Even if you have not been diagnosed with diabetes, you’ve probably already heard the term glucose. Glucose is an important player in the body and in diabetes.

In your bloodstream, circulating to all the organs of the body, is sugar. Most of the sugar in your body is the kind called glucose. Other sugars in your body includes fructose, the sugar found in fruit, and ribose, the sugar that makes up the chromosomes that carry your genetic information. Glucoses’s main job is to supply the body with energy. The body breaks down glucose, releasing energy, water and carbon dioxide, the gas we expel when we breathe.

In answering the question, what is diabetes, it is important to note that glucose is a quickly available fuel source that can be used by nearly all of the tissues in the body, And when it comes to your brain, glucose is the only source of fuel it can use. The brain can survive without glucose for only a short time. Just as it can go only a few minute without oxygen. Because glucose is the only fuel your brain can use, your brain directs your nervous system and hormones-producing glands to protect your glucose level, making sure it does not fall too low. It is the glucose level that is meant when people talk about blood sugar, and it is the glucose level in your blood that is affected by diabetes.

The other fuel used in the body are the fatty acids. Fatty acids differ from glucose in that they provide a source of fuel that is called upon only during longer periods of fasting. Fatty acids come from the fats we eat, and they are stored in our fat cells as triglycerides. Triglycerides are continuously being converted into fatty acids in the blood and then back again, waiting to be called upon for energy. The more fatty acids we store away in our fat cells, the more visible our energy reserves becomes. Excesses of these fatty acids are now found to play a role in the development of diabetes.

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