What Are Carbohydrates?

What Are Carbohydrates? With so much confusion about the role of carbohydrates ,I thought the best thing thing to do is actully tell you just how carbohydrates are used in your body.

Let's dive in...and find out just what are carbohydrates...

Carbohydrates can be categorized as vegetables, fruits, grains and legumes all of these apart from fruits contain the largest form of carbohydrate called STARTCH.

Startch is composed of many glucose molecules which are all joined together.

I interrupt this lesson for a newsflash...

Please go and grab a dry cracker from your cupboard, then put it into your mouth and let it dissolve.

Now although the cracker is not a sweet cracker you should get a taste of sweetness coming through, this is because startch gets broken down into glucose from the process which I
will now explain.....

Back To Our Normal Broadcast...

We have now placed the cracker in our mouth and the enzymes from our saliva are going to chop up the long carbohydrate molecules into smaller chains, branches or even a few single molecules.

The enzyme that gets produced from our salivary glands is called alpha amylase.

A good tip here is to realize that upto approximatly thirty percent of our digestion can start in the mouth, so it makes good sense to really chew your food.I mean it, chew, chew, chew....

Unlike the family dog who gulps down his food.Our dog  absolutley gulps down any meaty treats that I give him, it does'nt even touch sides). His meals all head straight for his stomach where protein digestion takes place.

What Are Carbohydrates? A Definition of Carbohydrates

On the one side we have Amylose (structured like a long unbranched chain.

On the other side we have Amylopectin(this is structured like a branched chain)

Both of these structures contain glucose as the repeating unit (when you break the molecule down) however they are joined together in a slightly different way.

"This may account for the different digestibility of various carbohydrates

There is a form of carbohydrate that is not digested by our digestive enzymes and that form is CELLULOSE (fibre).

Cellulose is mainly found in vegetable fibre and it consists of a long chain of glucose units joined in a special way which makes it very resistant to digestive juices.

Fibre is an extremely import source of roughage and is necessary for adequate bowel function

Only cellulose is eliminated via the bowel undigested. All the other carbohydrates are broken down into their single sugar components e.g. glucose and are then absorbed into the blood stream.

When sugar enters our bodies it can be transported to the liver where it may be stored as another long chain carbohydrate called Glycogen.

Glycogen molecules may either be stored in the liver or in our muscles.

Alternatively the absorbed sugar may be burned as energy. Some of the sugar can also be used by the body for other functions such as production of the following:

Mucopolysaccharides (Muco-poli-sac-a-rides)found in our cartilage, Heparin (for prevention of blood coagulation) and a range of glycoproteins (enzymes, hormones and antigens)

So to sum all of this up in a nutshell.

Startches are slowly broken up throughout the digestive tract until they reach the small intestine where they are all converted into simple sugars (monosaccharides) the stars of the show being mainly... Glucose, Fructose, Galactose and Mannose.

If glucose is needed by the body for energy rather than being stored as glycogen it leaves the liver, journeys along the blood stream giving itself to any tissue which needs energy.

Then insulin rolls in which pushes the glucose into our cells to be burned for fuel?

No guide to carbohydrates would be complete without mentioning the role of insulin....

So this is your definition of what are carbohydrates over and out and I now hand you over to my friend Insulin....

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