A cool guide to which amino acids your body can turn into…
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A cool guide to which amino acids your body can turn into sugar
Only two of the twenty can't contribute to glucose at all, leucine and lysine, and they both start with L which is honestly the whole mnemonic. Everything else is either fully glucogenic or splits down both routes.
The bit I found genuinely surprising is that your body can't turn fat into sugar either, for the exact same reason. Both fat and those two amino acids end up as acetyl-CoA, and the step that makes it only runs one way. That's a big part of why prolonged fasting eventually starts eating into muscle, since amino acids are one of the last things left that can hold blood glucose up.
If anyone wants a closer look, this one and a bunch of other biochem charts are at biochemtools.com/charts.html . All free, no signup, and you're welcome to print them or drop them in a handout.
#entertainment
Only two of the twenty can't contribute to glucose at all, leucine and lysine, and they both start with L which is honestly the whole mnemonic. Everything else is either fully glucogenic or splits down both routes.
The bit I found genuinely surprising is that your body can't turn fat into sugar either, for the exact same reason. Both fat and those two amino acids end up as acetyl-CoA, and the step that makes it only runs one way. That's a big part of why prolonged fasting eventually starts eating into muscle, since amino acids are one of the last things left that can hold blood glucose up.
If anyone wants a closer look, this one and a bunch of other biochem charts are at biochemtools.com/charts.html . All free, no signup, and you're welcome to print them or drop them in a handout.
#entertainment
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