I read that a carb is a carb and if it fits your macros then don’t worry. But then I also read that sugar is terrible for you and you should eat complex carbs because of blood sugar levels. Whats this all about? Blood sugar, glucose, insulin, and diabetes? Can someone ELI5?
In: Biology
A carb is a carb, kind of. All carbs are made of molecules of sugar, and for our body they are just sugar. But complex carbs will take more time to be fully absorbed before converted to energy. For instance a carb that also has lots of fiber will take more time to be digested.
When the energy provided by the carbs is not used by the system it will be converted as fat in your body. That is the main problem with simple carbs, since you will become with a lot of energy available that must be wasted in a short amount of time, while with complex carbs it’s more sustained. So when calculating your macros be aware that refined sugar is completely different from sweet potato.
The faster the absorption of sugar the more glucose you will have in your bloodstream. Glucose is the sugar you got from processing the carbs you eat.
Insuline is an hormone and one of it’s main functions is to promote glucose into the cells in order to reduce glicemia in the bloodstream.
Glycemia is the amount of glucose in the bloodstream that comes from processed carbs by the body.
Diabetes is a disease where the pancreas can’t produce enough insuline to prevent glycemia.
When you eat simple sugars, you will become with a lot of glucose in your bloodstream very quickly and insulin must be released by the pancreas in order to reduce glycemia. This causes an insuline spike. If you do it very often you will become insuline resistant, and this is whats called diabetes type 2.
Sugar is terrible and inflammatory and your body basically doesn’t need it for anything but it’s the preferred source of energy because its easier for the body to process carbs than it is to process fat.
Our body is capable of producing it’s own glucose through the liver in a process called glycogenolysis, for all functions where its needed.
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