– Why is insulin induced hypoglycemia a bad thing ?

Question

It is my understanding that insuline helps the glucose enter the cells.

How is too much insulin a problem, since the glucose goes where it is supposed to go ?

What are the main problems caused by a rush of glucose inside the cells ?

In: 1

Answer 1

The vast, vast majority of what your cells are doing at any given time is breaking down and reconstructing the proteins inside of themselves. On average, any given protein in a metabolically active cell (such as a neuron or heart cell) lasts about 4 hours before it gets broken down and rebuilt. Most of those proteins are just immediately reconstructed in the exact same place, so it doesn’t appear as though anything has actually happened and this process doesn’t accomplish much other than generating heat. But this is a very energy intensive process that is constantly ongoing in every single cell in your body.

Most cells don’t store meaningful amounts of sugar. As soon as they absorb sugar from your bloodstream they immediately burn it to produce energy that is used to fuel the constant breaking down and rebuilding of the cell’s protein.

So what happens if you inject a bunch of insulin into someone? Their cells absorb all of the sugar from their bloodstream. That causes a brief spike in the rate of protein turnover – this generates a small amount of heat, but otherwise doesn’t accomplish anything meaningful.

While protein turnover is where most of a cell’s energy is going, there are other functions that it needs sugar to fuel as well – in particular, nerves require sugar to generate electrical signals. Except whoops, now there’s no more sugar to fuel those other functions. There are other sources of energy that cells can use as fuel, but switching over to those is a complex biological process that happens slowly. So your nerves just stop functioning before those alternate energy sources can come online. It doesn’t matter that 30 minutes from now those alternate sources of energy would become available, because by that point you’ve either suffered serious organ damage or you’re dead.