you need sleep and food to regain energy, what kind of energy is this and where in the body is it stored?
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Like a lot of these comments are saying it’s sugars. More broadly the specific energy is a carbohydrate. When you eat foods of you look on the health facts it tells you the amount of carbohydrates the food has. These can come in mutliple forms/shapes and chains. Three of the most common are sucrose (table sugar), fructose ( this is the sugar that makes fruit sweet), and glucose. Glucose typically comes in chains called polysaccharides. ( Starch in potatoes is just glucose in long chains). The main sugar your body needs though is glucose. So the body has ways to break down the chains and also convert the fructose and sucrose into glucose. If your body doesn’t need any of thr excess sugars(energy) then it stores it as glycogen in the liver. Glycogen is essentially an insoluble/unusable polymer of glucose. Easy to store and won’t be taken up by cells. Of the body is in need of energy the sugars get taken up by cells and the process of turning that glucose into energy begins. There are three steps to this that are not really important for an ELI5 but essentially they are glycolysis, the citric acid cycle, and oxidative phosphorylation. All of this essentially turns glucose into ATP (Adenosine triphosphate) this is what your cells use for energy. So the answer to one of your questions is, the energy you need is ATP which is made from glucose. Sleep is a little interesting. Like others have said, you don’t use very much energy while you sleep. When your cells use up ATP for energy, that ATP is turned into ADP ( Adenosine Diphosphate) and this molecule is a large contributor to what makes you sleepy. So as you go throughout the day you build up all this ADP causing you to be more tired. There are other systems to cause sleepiness but this is one of them. Caffeine works by blocking the ADP from binding to the receptors that will send the sleepiness signals. So by sleeping you are able to convert that ADP that built up back into ATP so when you wake up you feel less tired and can start your day again. There are plenty of nuances here but I feel this is sufficient for ELI5
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