What is the relationship between insulin and blood sugar and why is chronically elevated blood sugar harmful?
A. Your body needs energy. The energy that’s needed comes from glucose. After a meal, your digestive system converts all the carbohydrates into glucose. The glucose from the carbohydrates you eat has to be absorbed by the muscle and produce energy. Something has to allow the glucose to get into the muscle. Insulin fits into the insulin receptor on cells and permits the glucose in the blood to get into the muscle. Muscle will take it up and store whatever it needs later as glycogen, or burn the fuel in mitochondria to produce chemical energy. In diabetes, the insulin receptor mechanism doesnt work very well, so glucose increases in the blood. Some glucose gets filtered out in the kidney and shows up in urine. This was first observed in dogs without a pancreas. Flies swarmed to their urine because it contained so much glucose. Q. So now the glucose is going into the urine instead of the muscle. A. Yes, and that causes a lack of energy. Insulin and glycogen maintain the blood glucose leve
