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One of my bio textbooks has told me a few intriguing tidbits:
1) Cells get an enormous amount of energy from metabolizing glucose. One molecule of glucose can allow a cell to produce something like 36 molecules of ATP. (That counts glycolysis, the Krebs cycle, and all the chemiosmosis stuff in the mitochondrial membrane.)
2) If we have an excess of glucose we can make fat and store it, but we cannot then make glucose from fatty acids. (We can, though, make acetyl CoA, and I presume that gets dumped right back into the Krebs cycle as if it came from glucose.)
3) "If our main fuel reservoir had to be carried as glycogen instead of fat, body weight would need to be increased by an average of about sixty pounds." Whoa.
I'm starting to realize how efficient fat is. The fatty acid oxidation process is WAY EFFING POWERFUL. Every turn of the crank gets me an acetyl CoA (plus a couple of bonus bits for the electron transport chain), and there are LOTS of turns of the crank for each of those long carbon chains in one fatty acid tail. Coooooooool.
But I'm still weirded out that we can't digest cellulose. HELLO! STARCH! Er, polysaccharide anyway! Full of tasty powerful lovely GLUCOSE! Except it's chained at the wrong corner of the glucose's carbon ring, and *poof*, we can't do squat with it. Cells are weird.
Oh, an interesting dietary carb note: there are glycogens in meat. After all, that's where we store a bunch of 'em: muscle tissue. We hydrolyze those just fine if we eat meat. I wouldn't have thought of that before. Now I get to try to figure out why there's less protein in your average plant cell. Eukaryotic cells friggin' RUN on proteins. I know there's some in there.
1) Cells get an enormous amount of energy from metabolizing glucose. One molecule of glucose can allow a cell to produce something like 36 molecules of ATP. (That counts glycolysis, the Krebs cycle, and all the chemiosmosis stuff in the mitochondrial membrane.)
2) If we have an excess of glucose we can make fat and store it, but we cannot then make glucose from fatty acids. (We can, though, make acetyl CoA, and I presume that gets dumped right back into the Krebs cycle as if it came from glucose.)
3) "If our main fuel reservoir had to be carried as glycogen instead of fat, body weight would need to be increased by an average of about sixty pounds." Whoa.
I'm starting to realize how efficient fat is. The fatty acid oxidation process is WAY EFFING POWERFUL. Every turn of the crank gets me an acetyl CoA (plus a couple of bonus bits for the electron transport chain), and there are LOTS of turns of the crank for each of those long carbon chains in one fatty acid tail. Coooooooool.
But I'm still weirded out that we can't digest cellulose. HELLO! STARCH! Er, polysaccharide anyway! Full of tasty powerful lovely GLUCOSE! Except it's chained at the wrong corner of the glucose's carbon ring, and *poof*, we can't do squat with it. Cells are weird.
Oh, an interesting dietary carb note: there are glycogens in meat. After all, that's where we store a bunch of 'em: muscle tissue. We hydrolyze those just fine if we eat meat. I wouldn't have thought of that before. Now I get to try to figure out why there's less protein in your average plant cell. Eukaryotic cells friggin' RUN on proteins. I know there's some in there.
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