Quotes & Sayings About Glucose

After a stressful event, we often crave comfort food. Our body is calling for more glucose and simple carbohydrates and fat... And in modern life, people tend to have fewer friends and less support, because there's no tribe. Being alone is not good for the brain. — John J. Ratey

Though it accounts for only 2 percent of the body's mass, it uses up a fifth of all the oxygen we breathe, and it's where a quarter of all our glucose gets burned. The brain is the most energetically expensive piece of equipment in our body, and has been ruthlessly honed by natural selection to be efficient at the tasks for which it evolved. One might say that the whole point of our nervous system, from the sensory organs that feed information to the glob of neurons that interprets it, is to develop a sense of what is happening in the present and what will happen in the future, so that we can respond in the best possible way. Strip away the emotions, the philosophizing, the neuroses, and the dreams, and our brains, in the most reductive sense, are fundamentally prediction and planning machines. — Joshua Foer

The brain's preferred source of fuel is glucose/carbohydrates. And when you go on a low-carb/high-protein diet, your brain is using low-octane fuel. You'll be a little groggy, a little grumpy. — Jack LaLanne

The same glucose ration was scrupulously administered to all the flasks equally. — Richard Dawkins

Every day, hundreds of millions of people stab themselves, bleed, and then offer, like a sacrifice, to the glucose monitor they're carrying with them. It's such a bad user interface that even though in the medium-term it's life or death for these people, hundreds of millions of people don't engage in this user interface. — Astro Teller

Sweetness was a sign that a plant was edible (most plants that are poisonous to humans taste bitter). Sweetness is also an indication that the plant is high in glucose, which meant that it would offer us lots of energy. — Cameron Diaz

Since 1985 our [American's] consumption of all added sugars- cane, beet, HFCS, glucose, honey, maple syrup, whatever- has climbed from 128 pounds to 159 pounds per person. — Michael Pollan

No matter how closely you examine the water, glucose, and electrolyte salts in the human brain, you can't find the point where these molecules became conscious. — Deepak Chopra

Insulin works to deposit calories as fat and to inhibit the use of that fat for fuel. Dietary carbohydrates are required to allow this fat storage to occur. Since glucose is the primary stimulator of insulin secretion, the more carbohydrates consumed - or the more refined the carbohydrates - the greater the insulin secretion, and thus the greater the accumulation of fat. "Carbohydrate is driving insulin is driving fat," as the Harvard endocrinologist George Cahill recently summed it up. — Gary Taubes

A new laboratory technique, positron emission tomography, uses radioactively labeled oxygen or glucose that essentially lights up specific and different areas of the brain being activated when a person speaks words or sees words or hears words, revealing the organic location for areas of behavioral malfunction. — Floyd Skloot

In fact, according to physicians, the functioning of the digestion depends less on the brain than on hormonal mechanisms and autoregulators. However, during a fast, the digestive system gets an increasing rest. About ten hours after a meal, the contractions stop and the feeling of hunger disappears; five or six hours later the glucose stops coming directly from the intestines and begins to produce itself from the reserve of glycogen contained in the liver. From then on, the body works on itself in a closed circuit, becoming itself the source of the energy it uses. Instead of destroying an appropriating to himself nourishment taken from outside, man enters a state of nonviolence and detachment relative to the outside world. — Adalbert De Vogue

Cortisol decreases insulin sensitivity by receptor cells, decreases glucose uptake, and increases blood sugar. The rise in blood sugar is intended to serve as a reservoir for the central nervous system, which requires a continuous supply of glucose to function. Problems arise when this stress state becomes chronic. When cortisol levels (and, therefore, blood sugar levels) are chronically elevated due to the stress in our lives, the risk of insulin resistance and hyperinsulinemia increases, and you start to gain weight. So, by being chronically stressed out, you gain weight. — James B. LaValle

carbohydrate controls insulin; insulin controls fat storage. Carbohydrates are not used as structural components in the body; instead, they are used only as a form of fuel, whether burned immediately while passing by different organs and muscles, or stored for later use. All forms of carbohydrates you eat, whether simple or complex, are eventually converted into glucose, — Mark Sisson

Shel Israel has been a diabetic for many years, jabbing his finger a few times every day to measure his blood sugar. Every six months he brings his glucose meter to his endocrinologist, who extracts and analyzes the data. His pharmacist recently informed him that a new California law requires him to share his data with them as well or his insurance coverage will be dropped, raising the monthly cost from about $8.25 to about $165. Who is behind this law? — Robert Scoble

This half century of research unequivocally supported the alternative hypothesis of obesity. It established that the relevant energy balance isn't between the calories we consume and the calories we expend, but between the calories - in the form of free fatty acids, glucose, and glycerol - passing in and out of the fat cells. If more and more fatty acids are fixed in the fat tissue than are released from it, obesity will result. — Gary Taubes

Your body will not burn fat while your insulin level is high. It's focused on using glucose. But once all of the glucose and glycogen is used, the insulin level falls — James O. Hill

For diabetes in particular, we know there's a relationship between lack of glucose regulation and complications like blindness and kidney failure. So if you were diabetic and you knew that you could get your glucose in a tight, normal range just by adjusting your lifestyle, wouldn't that be great? — Eric Topol

There's a wire injected under my skin a few days before an event and connected to that is a wireless transmitter. That device communicates my blood-glucose levels to the receiver unit, which is mounted above my steering wheel. — Charlie Kimball

So, in contrast to what you may have been led to believe, eating fat doesn't make you fat. Insulin is the primary hormone that drives the storage of fat in the fat tissues. And insulin is released not in response to dietary fat, but in response to dietary glucose. And the primary source of glucose in the modern diet is grain. — Josh Turknett

Your soul: pure glucose edged with hints
Of tentative and half-soiled tints — Edith Sitwell

When your liver and muscles become filled with glycogen, any glucose remaining in the bloodstream that isn't used in "real time" by your brain or muscles (such as during an intense workout) gets converted into triglycerides in the liver and sent to fat cells for storage. — Mark Sisson

I've found cinnamon to be very effective for lowering the glycemic response to meals. People have heard that before, but I didn't realize how profound it could be until I did the actual testing with continuous glucose monitors. And I tested all different varieties and species of cinnamon from Ceylon to Saigon. — Timothy Ferriss

In trying to explain life we have reduced it to a series of chemical reactions, whether it be the burning of glucose in mitochondria to create energy, or the folding of proteins to make bile, or pollen, or blood. Zoom out to where we perceive things, the titanic mathematics of it all is silent. We have twisted our thoughts and feelings into all sorts of psychological origami about whether these things are a result of evolution, intelligent design, or creation ex nihilo, and for all we know, our little planet is the only place that holds all of this wonder in a void that is too staggeringly huge to conceive. — Sean J Halford

The medical nanobots in my novel 'Small Miracles' tap the energy sources that the patient's own body provides. That is, they can metabolize glycerol and glucose, just as the cells in our bodies do. — Edward M. Lerner

Since the body can't break down resistant starch, it slips through the digestive track without ever turning into calories of glucose - a particular boon, we're told, for diabetics. When fake sugars and fake fats are joined by fake starches, the food industry will at long last have overcome the dilemma of the fixed stomach: whole meals you can eat as often or as much of as you like, since this food will leave no trace. Meet the ultimate - the utterly elastic! - industrial eater. — Michael Pollan

From the 1980s onward, manufacturers of products advertised as uniquely healthy because they were low in fat or specifically in saturated fat (not to mention "gluten free, no MSG & 0g trans fat per serving") took to replacing those fat calories with sugar to make them equally, if not more, palatable, and often disguising the sugar under one or more of the fifty-plus names by which the fructose-glucose combination of sugar and high-fructose corn syrup might be found. Fat — Gary Taubes

your need to consume calories on a regular schedule will diminish substantially when blood glucose levels are moderated and you start burning fat and ketones more efficiently through low-insulin — Mark Sisson

The cream and hot butter mingled and overflowed separating each glucose bead of caviar from its fellows, capping it in white and gold. — Evelyn Waugh

Our ancestors relied upon their advanced brains to survive during times of food shortage, and fortunately, the human brain is able to utilize body fat as an extremely efficient fuel to sustain function when glucose-providing food is unavailable. — David Perlmutter

But our brains are different from mice. Their cortex is tiny, which means their ability to learn from experience is tiny. They are built to run on innate rather than learned circuits. Our cortex is huge because we are designed to fill it up with acquired knowledge. We are not meant to run on pre-loaded programs. Every creature in nature runs on as few neurons as possible because neurons are metabolically expensive. They consume more oxygen and glucose than an active muscle. It takes so much energy to keep a neuron alive that they actually make it harder to survive. Neurons only promote survival if you really get your money's worth out of them, by wiring them up with survival-relevant information. Natural selection gave humans a gargantuan number of neurons. That means we were meant to use the experience we've stored in our neurons, not to ignore — Anonymous

Intuitive errors are normally much more frequent among ego-depleted people, and the drinkers of Splenda showed the expected depletion effect. On the other hand, the glucose drinkers were not depleted. Restoring the level of available sugar in the brain had prevented the deterioration of performance. — Daniel Kahneman

As this research had now made clear, the critical molecules determining the balance of storage and mobilization of fatty acids, of lipogenesis and lipolysis, are glucose and insulin - i.e., carbohydrates and the insulin response to those carbohydrates. — Gary Taubes

Many people think that the high blood sugar seen in diabetes is due to a failure in clearance because the cells cannot take up the glucose in the blood for fuel. Even the textbooks say it. Glucose enters cells through a receptor called GLUT4. While the number of GLUT4 receptors in people with diabetes does not increase in response to dietary glucose as much as it does in healthy people, it this seems that this is not the major cause of hyperglycemia. People with diabetes still have enough of these receptors under most conditions. The major problem, as shown in Figure 10-1, appears to be the persistence of glucose production from the liver. — Richard David Feinman

If blood-sugar levels increase - say, after a meal containing carbohydrates - then more glucose is transported into the fat cells, which increases the use of this glucose for fuel, and so increases the production of glycerol phosphate. This is turn increases the conversion of fatty acids into triglycerides, so that they're unable to escape into the bloodstream at a time when they're not needed. Thus, elevating blood sugar serves to decrease the concentration of fatty acids in the blood, and to increase the accumulated fat in the fat cells. — Gary Taubes

The most surprising discovery made by Baumeister's group shows, as he puts it, that the idea of mental energy is more than a mere metaphor. The nervous system consumes more glucose than most other parts of the body, and effortful mental activity appears to be especially expensive in the currency of glucose. — Daniel Kahneman

I wear a continuous glucose monitor when I'm racing. — Charlie Kimball

Even though I seem not human, a mute shelf

of glucose, bottled blood, machinery

to swell the lung and pump the heart - even so,

do not put out my life. Let me still glow. — Dudley Randall

Accept that diabetes care is up to you. You are the one who decides what to eat, how much to exercise, and when to check your blood glucose. Accept this for what it is - control. You are in control. — American Diabetes Association

The bold implication of this idea is that the effects of ego depletion could be undone by ingesting glucose, and Baumeister and his colleagues have confirmed this hypothesis in several experiments. — Daniel Kahneman

The great edifice of variety and choice that is an American supermarket turns out to rest on a remarkably narrow biological foundation comprised of a tiny group of plants that is dominated by a single species: Zea mays, a giant tropical grass most Americans know as corn ...
Read the ingredients on the label of any processed food and, provided you know the chemical name it travels under, corn is what you will find. For modified or unmodified starch, for glucose syrup and maltodextrin, for crystalline fructose and ascorbic acid, for lecithin and dextrose, lactic acid and lysine, for maltose and HFCS, for MSG and polyols, for the caramel color and xanthan gum, read: corn ... There are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn. This goes for the nonfood items as well ...
And us? — Michael Pollan

My team fills two separate drink bottles for me in the car. One is water, and the other has orange juice. I just turn a valve and go from water to juice ... to adjust my glucose levels. — Charlie Kimball

Tightly focused attention gets fatigued - much like an overworked muscle - when we push to the point of cognitive exhaustion. The signs of mental fatigue, such as a drop in effectiveness and a rise in distractedness and irritability, signify that the mental effort needed to sustain focus has depleted the glucose that feeds neural energy. — Daniel Goleman

In our 14,384 oral glucose tolerances with insulin assays, there were 5,128 or 36 percent with lowered glucose levels after the first hour of peaking. The glucose levels were between 20 and 59 mg/dl. — Joseph R. Kraft

common table sugar, or sucrose, is a carbohydrate made up of two simple sugars, fructose and glucose. All plants produce sucrose, but a few contain very large quantities. Natives in the land now called New Guinea, the massive island north of Australia, discovered a tropical grass that came to be known as sugarcane, perhaps around 8000 BC. The sweet-tasting stalks were eventually carried to other lands, including India, where juices pressed from sugarcane were first boiled to produce crystals. Darius — Richard J. Johnson

No other tissue in the body relies solely on glucose for energy except the testes. (This is why men occasionally experience a battle for resources between their brains and their glands.) — Daniel J. Levitin

From the moment we are diagnosed with any type of diabetes, we begin a part of our lives in which we are constantly graded. Constantly tested. Constantly told whether we're doing a great job, a good job, an okay job, or a really bad job based on the numbers that show up on our glucose meter and A1C test. We are graded on what we eat or on how often we exercise. Whether we check our blood sugar regularly or rarely, and somewhere in our heads we can't help but tell ourselves that we're "good" or "bad" based entirely on how well we are able to accomplish this neverending to-do list throughout every single day. And that is exhausting. — Ginger Vieira

Seeing your glucose every minute on your phone, it really changes your lifestyle. You ask yourself, 'Do I really need that piece of cake? No, because I don't want to stress out my pancreas.' — Eric Topol

One of the advantages of something like Slack is that I tap on the app icon, and it's just the people at my company and just the people I work with. There's a strong boundary there which aids in comprehension. It's one less molecule of glucose in my brain to manage it all. — Stewart Butterfield

Anything that works to transport more glucose into the fat cells - insulin, for example, or rising blood sugar - will lead to the conversion of more fatty acids into triglycerides, and the storage of more calories as fat. — Gary Taubes

The brain is provided with a number of enzyme systems which serve to co-ordinate its workings. Some of these enzymes regulate the supply of glucose to the brain cells. Mescalin inhibits the production of these enzymes and thus lowers the amount of glucose available to an organ that is in constant need of sugar. When mescalin reduces the brain's normal ration of sugar what happens? Too few cases have been observed, and therefore a comprehensive answer cannot yet be given. But what happens to the majority of the few who have taken mescalin under supervision can be summarized as follows ... — Aldous Huxley

Researchers have reported that the brain and central nervous system actually run more efficiently on ketones than they do on glucose. — Gary Taubes

The baby, as I had reason from experience to expect and had in fact prepared my bag for, suffers from dehydration. He's dried up like a prune. The treatment is simple and the results spectacular. Slip a needle in his scalp vein and hang a bottle of glucose — Walker Percy

Eating cholesterol and bad fat will contribute to heart disease if and only if you bathe them in a massive lifelong overdose of insulin and glucose. — Mark Sisson

soda, or pasta, your body converts the carbs in them to a kind of sugar called glucose, — Grant Petersen

The production and consumption of glucose, and hence, the blood sugar level, are controlled by a functional endocrine equilibrium. — Bernardo Houssay

Worry, shame, and fear can't be the energy with which we deal with food and weight. It only spurs us to eat more food and produce more glucose/sugar which gets stored as fat. — Bill Crawford

If the young man ate candy, the wrangler says, that's probably what's kept him alive so long. Glucose is a natural antidote to cyanide poisoning. Based on anecdotal evidence, glucose binds with
the cyanide to produce less toxic compounds. — Chuck Palahniuk

Your brain is the "greediest" organ in the body; the resting brain uses oxygen and glucose at 10 times the rate of the rest of the body. Thus, even though the brain makes up less than 2.5 percent of total body weight, it is responsible for 20 percent of the body's energy consumption. — Patricia Wolfe

Then there are the metabolic costs of switching itself that I wrote about earlier. Asking the brain to shift attention from one activity to another causes the prefrontal cortex and striatum to burn up oxygenated glucose, the same fuel they need to stay on task. And the kind of rapid, continual shifting we do with multitasking causes the brain to burn through fuel so quickly that we feel exhausted and disoriented after even a short time. We've literally depleted the nutrients in our brain. This leads to compromises in both cognitive and physical performance. Among other things, repeated task switching leads to anxiety, which raises levels of the stress hormone cortisol in the brain, which in turn can lead to aggressive and impulsive behaviors. By contrast, staying on task is controlled by the anterior cingulate and the striatum, and once we engage the central executive mode, staying in that state uses less energy than multitasking and actually reduces the brain's need for glucose. — Daniel J. Levitin

Your pancreas, however, because of Metabolism B, releases excess insulin to deal with the bagel's glucose rush. Once this insulin helps to refill the glycogen stores in your muscle and liver, the excess keys will open excess fat cells. In an effort to feed these fat cells, you will dip into your normal blood sugar, leaving too little glucose left in the bloodstream to keep up your energy and sense of satiation. Your blood glucose has now dipped below the normal range. And so, after eating exactly the same meal, you will end up "fatter" than your friend and with lower blood glucose than she has! — Diane Kress