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There's not vast amounts of glycogen (which is the stored form of glucose) in the liver, there is much more stored in the muscles, but the stuff stored in the muscles is for their use only, it can't get back into the blood stream to go and fuel e.g. the brain.Yikes!! I need a little more explaining of what you said.
Thanks
Great info @SimonP78 do you have some references. I’m interested in reading what you have said. ThanksThere's not vast amounts of glycogen (which is the stored form of glucose) in the liver, there is much more stored in the muscles, but the stuff stored in the muscles is for their use only, it can't get back into the blood stream to go and fuel e.g. the brain.
The liver and muscles store glucose from your meals when you take insulin; the liver can also release glucose if blood sugar is running low (e.g. you've not eaten)/are being chased by lions (or similar)/have just got out of bed/etc.
In the first instance (blood sugar running low), a hormone called glucagon is released by the pancreas' alpha cells (the beta cells release insulin fwiw) and this hormone tells the liver to release glucose (by breaking down glycogen). However, if there's too much insulin in the blood stream the glucagon isn't produced, so the liver won't release stored glucose.
In the latter cases (lions, getting up - aka Foot on the Floor and its close relative Dawn Effect), it's natural stress hormones which cause the liver to release glucose (to help with fight or flight), from experience even quite large amounts of insulin don't counteract the effects of these hormones.
We apparently have 1 or 2 days of glucose stored before we run out? So why would insulin use cause low blood sugars if too much was used without new glucose intake?
Glucose is fuel for the brain and the glucose gets to the brain via your blood. Hence you need a certain amount of glucose in your blood otherwise your brain will quickly shutdown, i.e you go into a coma.
Hi, I was regularly informed about this hypothesis that constant carbs are a necessity for brain function from the majority of my doctors and my endocrinologist.But too much glucose in your blood is also bad and insulin is used to move glucose out of the blood and into storage (e.g. the liver)
Non-diabetics will stop producing insulin when their levels are low enough and may instead produce glycogen which releases glucose back into the blood
Diabetics will also produce glycogen which will try to release glucose back from the storage. But we can't get rid of the insulin that we have already injected which means it may be removing glucose from the blood stream faster that the glycogen releases it.
The body naturally adapts to fasting.So does fasting use up some extra not needed stored glucose? Sorry if this was explained already.
After much consideration my endocrinologist came to the conclusion that carbs were not needed for brain function, as the body will adapt.
No, I don't disagree at all, in that the body adapts.I didn't mean to say (or imply) that carbs were needed. Indeed I was under the impression that this was generally accepted - based on the observation that before insulin was discovered, most type 1 diabetics still died even if they avoided all carbs.
Apparently my message was edited to remove the 'patronising' bit where I said it was overly simplistic (it was supposed to be an ELI5) . So whilst I did said that 'carbs gets converted to glucose and absorbed into your blood stream' this is indeed overly simplistic as it is not the only way that we can get glucose - it just happens to be the most common.
So I would agree that carbs are not needed for brain function, but I still think glucose is needed or do you (or your endo) disagree?
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