This is video number three for my nutrition classes for carbohydrates. I'm only going to go through this really quickly because you just had an entire lecture.. or entire chapter rather on carbohydrates (digestion!).. I mean generally speaking this is how it works: we eat carbohydrate rich foods, there are some enzymes in the mouth for breaking down starches called amylase. Generally we don't keep food in our mouth that long to completely digest for example saltine cracker - they always use that example. But the big key is to open up the food in your mouth to increase its surface area to make it small enough to be digested and you know for things like almonds and nuts and seeds to open up the insides which may also have carbohydrate that is digestible and like starch. And have that available to the body. We get into the stomach.. there's not a lot going on.. there's no amylase, there's no starch enzyme in the stomach. There's softening up food there's kneading food.. not I need a beer, it's more like kneading as you're making bread or a cat is making biscuits, right. Kneading with the k. Fiber will fill you up and, that's.. you know... one of these arguments about eating a high fiber food first when you eat, because it generally does fill you up. It you know.. it takes up space so you eat less of other foods, which may not be as healthy for you. When we get to the small intestine that's where most of this takes place. The pancreas makes an enzyme called amylase. It takes the starch and breaks it down into smaller molecules. Hopefully you can get that molecule down to maltose, sucrose, or lactose from dairy and then we've got the enzymes lactase, maltase, and sucrase.. those are not actually made by the pancreas... in, they're not made by the pancreas...they're not in the pancreatic juice.. those enzymes actually sit on the villi. They sit on the surface of the villi and so when when malt.. when maltose or sucrose or lactose comes forward if you will, you can snip them in half and since we've got transporters for glucose, fructose, and galactose all those sugars can be can be brought in. Anything other than that really is going to end up in the large intestine. For some fibers, like soluble fibers are fermentable, they can cause gas. Insoluble fibers generally go right through you, so skin, seeds those just go right through you. Celery is not causing anyone to have any gas and then the big question is what happens once the sugars are absorbed? So glucose stays glucose. The liver will convert fructose to glucose. That's actually a very slow process and the big.. the big concern is if you eat a lot of fructose, more than the liver can handle, people see.. people suggest that all that extra fructose gets converted to fat.. to get it out of the bloodstream. So that's not good. And the galactose which which came from milk sugar lactose, that gets converted to glucose. So what you really have after a meal is a lot of glucose floating around. And what's going to happen to the glucose? The plan is you just can't burn it all right then... nobody eats a plate of spaghetti, then just runs a marathon. The plan is to store it and the places that we want to store it in are the muscle, for the muscle, and the liver ... temporarily, so the liver can provide it to the body later. So the muscle and the liver take in glucose and snap them together like lego pieces and make glycogen, human starch. Wow does this work? It's hormonally regulated. When blood sugar goes up from a certain range, and the body does try to keep sugar in a range between 70 to 100 to 110 milligrams of glucose per a deciliter. A deciliter is 100 milliliters.. like a third of a can of a coke. Okay, when.. when blood sugar starts to rise, the pancreas monitors blood sugar and it says, okay.. clearly there's sugar coming in... we don't want it floating around indefinitely, and I will make a hormone called insulin. Insulin will . go to many cells of the body, especially the liver especially.. especially the muscle and tell those tissues, please there's plenty of glucose available, take it up and store it. As long as you have high blood sugar you will make insulin. If you literally pack the liver full of glycogen, done.. you pack your muscles full of glycogen, done ..and there's still a lot of glucose in the bloodstream you will still make insulin. What the liver will do is convert some of that to fat, and some.. and some of your fat cells will convert that to fat. Look, the glucose is coming back down in the presence of insulin one way or another. Ideally you store it as glycogen... or.. or hopefully you don't eat so much carbohydrate that you end up making some of that into body fat. When blood sugar comes back down to normal the the pancreas stops making insulin. And that entire storage process process stops. So now you're in, kind of, like the in-between period. Between meals glucose is floating around the bloodstream, it's being sucked up by red blood cells, it's being taken in by nervous cells and eventually the amount of glucose floating around will be less and less.. Your blood sugar will drop, right. Not "low" blood sugar.. but lowering your blood sugar. That's an opportunity for the pancreas once again to intervene. It..it, the pancreas likes to see blood sugar in a certain range... not too much, not too little. Between meals it releases a hormone you probably have never heard of called glucagon. Glucagon really acts on the liver - it's the pancreas telling the liver, you took up the glucose, you stored it as glycogen, now you need to provide the body some energy. And what the liver does is, it drops a little bit of glucose into the bloodstream and kind of brings your blood sugar back to normal. And then as it drops again, the pancreas releases more glucagon that goes to the liver, the liver breaks down glycogen to glucose... glucagon, glycogen, glucose.. I didn't name them - do not be angry at the messenger. And essentially this is how it works. Your liver feeds your body between meals. If you're not very active you might be able to suck off the liver.. like sip off the liver for eight hours. You could literally eat a big breakfast and go all the way to the end of the day before you start to feel like... oh i'm feeling a little lightheaded, because at that point your blood sugar is low and the liver is, like, "look I don't have anything left"... but some folks can go 8 to 12 hours on what they consumed you know in the morning. It is amazing. If you were to exercise during the day that would.. that would suck up and drain down all your glucose and you'd run out of it a lot quicker. Okay that works for during the day: insulin is your storage hormone and glucagon is your release hormone. When you play sports or are injured the amount of sugar you need to feed the body is greater than what we consider the normal range. So that's when you make epinephrine. It's the one of the adrenal hormones made during stress and exercise. It doesn't come online immediately in exercise... it takes like 10 to 20 minutes to start making epinephrine. And epinephrine really does go to the liver and say, look, I'm exercising now.. you need to release more than the average amount of glucose, and please do... and and it's true you do. And by the way, epinephrine goes to body fat and says, okay we need more body fat than normal. Epinephrine goes to your muscle and gives the muscle permission to break down its own glycogen and its own fat even quicker. Epinephrine truly is a "throw everything in the bloodstream and let's go" (hormone). And you'll have much higher blood sugar than normal and much higher circulating fat than normal while you exercise. And as soon as you're done exercising, epinephrine levels are dropped down to kind of the baseline, and then all that glucose will be restored back into the body's glycogen and all your fat gets packaged back into your fat cells as fat. So that is the regulation of.. of.. of sugar. For after a meal - insulin; between meals - glucagon; during exercise or injury - those kind of things - epinephrine. I have a great animation that I.. that was from a publisher that actually went bankrupt and their animation was online and I... I have it so it's in Canvas. Please watch it. It does a great job of explaining explaining insulin and glucagon