Carbohydrates Metabolism – Imaluop

Hi, now we are going to discuss how carbohydrates metabolism occurs inside a living system for maintaining the cellular activities of living organisms but before we discuss more we will give you a general idea about carbohydrates.

We take different types of food for our energy requirements for different cellular activities and carbohydrates are one major type of food and carbohydrates food meet our primary energy requirements.

But carbohydrates do not only take part to supply the cellular metabolic energy it also need for maintaining different biochemical structure like it takes part in producing prosthetic group of hormones, on plasma membrane they present with lipid as glycolipids which act as cell receptor, they also great role in determining blood group factors. 

Carbohydrates also take part in the formation of some very important cell structure like in formation of DNA and RNA the nucleotide are made of ribose sugar in case of RNA and deoxyribose sugar in case of DNA and both ribose and deoxyribose sugar are carbohydrates.  

For this reason we have to take carbohydrates rich foods on a daily basis and in general the carbohydrates rich foods we take mostly have different types of polysaccharide like starch but our body cells are not able to utilise the complex sugar.

So they need to be simple to utilise them and for it our digestive system breaks down the disaccharides and polysaccharide into simple monosaccharides which can be used by our cell to meet our energy requirements by the process of cellular respiration. 

What is Carbohydrates Metabolism:  

The carbohydrates we take though our diet most of the time do not present in suitable format as the cell need for various purposes so the cell modify them by breaking down and conversion from one carbohydrate form to another to make them suitable format and the biochemical reactions take place during this process are known as carbohydrates metabolism.  

We know that when we take the disaccharides and polysaccharide rich foods then in our digestive system they convert into simple monosaccharide form glucose and this glucose is further processed through the glycolysis and Krebs cycle to release ATP.

When we take a lot of carbohydrate rich foods than our requirements then the extra glucose produced after digestion stores in our body in the form of glycogen and the biochemical process which converts extra glucose into glycogen is known as glycogenesis.

When our do unable to meet the carbohydrates due to low carbohydrate intake or due to high carbohydrates demand then the stored glycogen convert into glucose again by the process of glycogenolysis and another one example of carbohydrates metabolism is pentose phosphate pathway which converts the hexose sugar into pentose sugar. 

Problem Related to Carbohydrates Metabolism: 

Diabetes Mellitus: 

Glucose metabolism is somewhat controlled by a endocrine secretion of pancreas, insulin which controls the cellular activity for glucose metabolism when the insulin secretion do not occur at optimum level then we face different glucose metabolism disorders like hypoglycemia is a condition in which blood have high level of blood sugar. 

Lactose Intolerance: 

Most adults face an allergy for it but it occurs due to the deficiency in an enzyme which controls lactose metabolism and the enzyme is lactase. When the enzyme lactase is not present in our body in sufficient amounts then our body cell is unable to convert lactose into simple form carbohydrates glucose then it creates a condition which is known as lactose Intolerance. 

Carbohydrates Metabolism
Carbohydrates Metabolism

Galactosemia: 

It is a congenital genetic disorder due to the abnormalities in the enzyme which controls the glucose metabolism in our body so the person is not able to process glucose properly and this is a very rare case. 

Read More: Types and Examples of Carbohydrates

Leave a Comment