Does excess sugar actually get converted into fat?

This is a simple way to explain it. The body's cells all want glucose to be the source of energy at all times, this is optimal. Glucose will be circulating in the blood, taken up by the cells, undergo glycolysis in the cytoplasm and get completely oxidated by the mitochondria.

So they key is to make sure the amount of glucose in your blood is sufficient for the body's needs. If there is excess, because of evolution, our body will store it in other forms. Your body has many mechanisms to ensure that this is how your energy stores are managed. Insulin and glucagon are the chief controllers.

So there are 3 possible scenarios for your blood sugar levels:

(1) After a meal, your blood sugar levels will be high from the food you ingest. The pancreas detects this, and releases insulin to remove glucose from the blood, and puts it into cells for storage. Insulin is an "anabolic" hormone. It will use the glucose to build molecules. So insulin acts on muscle cells to take up glucose, and make glycogen. It also stimulates protein production and muscle growth. Insulin will act on fat cells to take up glucose, and make fats. Lastly, it will act on the liver to make liver glycogen.

(2) So hours after eating your meal, as your body uses the blood's glucose, the pancreas detects this. Less insulin is produced, and more glucagon is produced. Glucagon is "catabolic", its job is to get glucose into the blood, so the brain can have energy. So glucagon activates glycogen into glucose. And then it will act on muscle cells to break down proteins into amino acids. Amino acids are the precursors to glucose in the pathway called "gluconeogensis" which occurs in the liver. THIS IS IMPORTANT, because the brain REQUIRES glucose to function, and this is where it gets it from. Some cells (like heart muscle in particular) can use fatty acids and oxidize them completely, so glucagon will also mobilize fatty acids.

(3) In a time of starvation or intense exercise, the body will continue to burn protein and fats. But after a while, the Citric Acid Cycle, which is the central pathway of oxidative metabolism, gets depleted of its contents, and the above pathway of gluconeogenesis gets shut down in favor of a more economic pathway called ketogenesis.

So what does all of this mean? It means that when you eat a lot of carbohydrates, you are in a long-lasting high glucose period. This means your pancreas will release a lot of insulin, and yes, fat cells will take it up, and make fats.

The basis of the Atkins diet is that it will keep your body in (2) and (3). Your body will make ketones through ketogenesis, and urinate them out, essentially dumping calories down the toilet.

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RE:

Does excess sugar actually get converted into fat?

My understanding was that the body burns carbohydrates then fat and finally proteins when it needs energy.

The reason that excessive carbohydrate consumption is a bad idea is that the body will burn off all the simplest fuels first and store the rest ie. Fat.

Am I right in thinking that the...

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That's actually kind of a complicated question. SOME of the sugar you take in gets turned into fat very quickly. (ie, the fructose moves quickly to the liver, which spews it out as VLDL and triglycerides, or stores as liver fat.) But excess blood sugar (glucose), more of gradual process in stages, I think. First glucose is packed into cells for energy (whether you're working out or not, may not make much difference). THEN any excess is stored as glycogen. But you can only store a modest amount of glycogen, so THEN any more excess is converted to body fat.

Does Sugar Turn Into Fat

Carbohydrates convert to glycerol backbones for triglyceride energy storage so yes there is some conversion.

Glycolysis, in the cytosol (fluid portion) of a cell, does two things. It degrades monosaccharides to generate energy, and it provides glycerol for triglyceride synthesis and these are the main form for energy storage.

The triglycerides are taken in by diet so how much is de novo generated is the real question.

This is a study on de novo synthesis from a high carbohydrate diet.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC507644...

Studies in mice tracing the carbon in lipogenesis of triglycerides shows it does come from glucose or other carbohydrates

http://www.jbc.org/content/284/10/6101.abstract

Keep healthier dessert options on hand so you have something have fun with during office birthdays and additional celebrations.

Sip calorie-free h2o, seltzer, or green tea together with your meal instead of soda, sweetened iced tea, or juice.

10 days

A reader asks, "What's the real story on using sugar? What does it do to our body, does it get turned into fat?"

This is an excellent question, and one that I think applies to almost everyone. In answering it, I'm going to give you a brief description of the biochemical events that take place when a person consumes sugar.

In explaining this subject to many people over a period of several years, I found the most useful metaphor to be that of an automobile engine. Let's take a Toyota Corolla, one of the most popular cars on the street today. The Toyota Corolla has an engine that's designed to burn a certain type of fuel. That fuel, gasoline, has a certain flash point and a given output of power per gallon of gasoline. There are other fuels that power other types of vehicles -- for example, jets run on a high-octane petroleum product that has far more energy per gallon than automobile gasoline. Diesel fuel, on the other hand, burns more slowly.

So you have different types of fuels for different vehicles. Most people understand the idea that if you took your Toyota Corolla, drove it down to the airport, and filled it up on jet fuel, you wouldn't get a faster Toyota Corolla. Instead, you would get a critically damaged Toyota Corolla engine, because the fuel would burn too hot, too fast, and it would overpower the design of the engine. In fact, you probably wouldn't drive more than 10 miles before the engine burned up, and you would have to overhaul the entire engine in order to drive your car again.

This is sort of what goes on when it comes to the human digestive system and sugars. The human digestive system was designed to consume foods that are readily available in the natural surrounding environment. These foods can be compared to certain types of fuels because each food releases energy at a given rate during digestion (primarily based on fiber and fructose content).

As an example, let's take a look at an apple. It contains fiber, vitamins and minerals, and lots of carbohydrates. The carbohydrates are the fuel. But the carbohydrates are bound up in the fiber of the apple so that it takes your body a fair amount of time and effort to release those carbohydrates and convert them into fuel. So you could call the apple a medium-burning carbohydrate, or in medical terms, it has a lower glycemic index than straight sugar.

But if you take straight sugar, that is, refined white sugar, which is something that does not occur naturally in the environment, and you put that in your mouth, then your body converts that into blood sugar very rapidly. It's like pouring jet fuel down your throat. This is the same as filling up your Toyota gas tank with jet fuel and trying to drive away. When you eat sugar you consume soft drinks -- which are even worse because they are liquid sugar -- you are trying to run your metabolic engine on jet fuel, and the human metabolic engine was not designed to run on jet fuel.

So what happens? When you first consume any sort of refined sugars or refined carbohydrates (like white flour), the digestion process begins immediately -- in fact, it begins even before you swallow the foods. There are digestive enzymes in your saliva that go to work on these sugars and start converting them into blood sugar, even before they hit your stomach. Once they're in your stomach, they are mixed with acidic digestive juices and physically churned through stomach muscle contractions so that it creates a liquid paste. This liquid, sugary paste is then very easily absorbed through the intestinal walls, causing a rapid spike in blood sugar levels.

So your blood sugar, which might have been around 80 or 90 before you drank the soft drink or ate that candy bar, now suddenly starts spiking up to 150 or 200, or perhaps even higher. This creates an emergency situation in your body. High blood sugar is very dangerous for human beings. If it is allowed to continue, it will cause symptoms that are more classically known as diabetic neuropathy, which means the nerves that feed various limbs in your body (feet, mostly) start to die. Diabetics who maintain high blood sugar over a long period of time often have to have their feet amputated because the nerves in their feet are wasting away.

No raw after four. Your body can’t digest natural food after 4pm so eat fruit and salad earlier within the day and stick with cooked food at night.