I dont know why but this is one of those things I just cant make sense of even with Google. So is sugar found in blood and the body there from eating sugar or a natural accurance regardless of diet? Is sugar as a food and blood sugar completly seperate things? This has bothered me for 2 decades. Explain it like I am 3 please.
In: Biology
Ok. Let’s begin with the beginning. Sugars aren’t a single substance. They’re a group of chemicals. There are a lot of sugars. For example, starch is a sugar. Cellulose is also a sugar. When we say “add some sugar to my coffee”, we refer to the common name of a compound called sucrose.
Sugars are basically a chain. Their properties vary based on the type of links, and the length of the chain. There are a lot of types of links, but we’ll concern ourselves with the most common one: glucose. Now, most of the stuff we consume contains sugars made from these links. And we make the links consumable by breaking the chain. So, if you eat a longer chain and a shorter chain, but with the same links, the end result will be the same. Only the quantity will vary.
For example, let’s have a slice of bread with some chocolate. The slice of bread has starch, which is a very long chain of glucose, and the chocolate has a short chain of glucose, aka sucrose (it has only two links). Now, if we break down the chains, what do we get? Glucose on both sides.
But in order to use the glucose we’ve just made, we have to carry it to the cells. How do we do that? We put it in the blood. Hence blood sugar.
This is why cows, for example, also have sugar in their blood, despite never eating any, well, sugar. They can break down cellulose chains into links, which makes them usable.
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