How does sugar converted into fat

Only the liver can deal with fructose. When you consume sugar, 20 percent of the glucose will go to the liver, but percent of the fructose.

This is a process called de novo lipogenesis. It's how you turn sugar into fat. Either the liver will release the fat into the bloodstream, which will raise triglycerides a risk factor for heart disease and obesity , or the liver won't release it and "it will stay there and precipitate". Your pancreas has to make extra insulin to make the liver do its job.

Now you've got high insulin levels everywhere. You're gaining weight and your insulin is blocking the leptin in the level of the brain -- making you hungrier. You've got a vicious cycle of consumption and disease. It's called fibre. In other words, fruit, which has fibre," Lustig said. There are two types of fibre: soluble and insoluble fibre. Soluble fibre is like the pectin which holds jam together, and insoluble fibre is like cellulose like the stringy stuff in celery.

You need both -- and fruit has both. Then the soluble fibre plug the holes in the net," Lustig explained. And this is where fibre gets really cool: when we eat fibre, it feeds our gut bacteria. We don't absorb it for our own use or storage, Lustig explained.

There's something in the second part of the intestine that's not in the first part -- bacteria. The microbiome. Those bacteria have to eat to live. And that lets the good bacteria grow, which means the bacteria chew up the energy instead of you absorbing it. That's what is not okay. For example, fruit juice," Lustig said.

Real food is low sugar and high fibre. Processed food is high sugar and low fibre. However, these organs have a limited capacity to store glycogen. If you eat more sugar than your liver and muscles can store as glycogen, the excess will be converted to fat and deposited into adipose tissue.

This process is called lipogenesis. In other words, sugar turns into fat when consumed in large amounts. Let's say that you eat a bowl of pasta and some ice cream. If your glycogen stores are already full, the excess sugar will be stored as fat. But if your glycogen stores are empty such as when you're fasting or engaging in high-intensity workouts , your body will convert sugar to glucose and use it for energy.

A part of it will be stored as glycogen, not fat. All in all, sugar is unlikely to cause weight gain, heart disease or diabetes when consumed in moderation. The problem is that it hides in thousands of foods, so it's easy to go overboard without realizing it.

Ice cream, chocolate, pastries and candies are not the only sources of added sugar. Many seemingly healthy foods and drinks, such as fruit juices, ketchup, chocolate milk and cereals, are loaded with sugar and have little nutritional value. That's why it's so important to check food labels. Protein can also be used for energy, but the first job is to help with making hormones, muscle, and other proteins.

Broken down into amino acids , used to build muscle and to make other proteins that are essential for the body to function. Broken down into fatty acids to make cell linings and hormones. Extra is stored in fat cells. After a meal, the blood sugar glucose level rises as carbohydrate is digested. This signals the beta cells of the pancreas to release insulin into the bloodstream.

Insulin helps glucose enter the body's cells to be used for energy. If all the glucose is not needed for energy, some of it is stored in fat cells and in the liver as glycogen. As sugar moves from the blood to the cells, the blood glucose level returns to a normal between-meal range.

When the blood sugar level falls below that range, which may happen between meals, the body has at least three ways of reacting:. Juan Gallegos, he's a liver expert at the University of Utah Hospital. I'm hoping you can help clarify something that I've heard, I don't know if this is true of not, but I've heard that if you eat an excess of sugar that your liver can't process it properly and it just turns it immediately into fat.

So if I'm eating a tub of ice cream every night, I'm going to get a lot fatter because of that, is that true? Juan Gallegos: That is partly true because we know there's a very close interplay between the liver, which is the chemical factory of our bodies, with the pancreas, which is the main regulator of your blood sugar and with the fat cells or adipocytes, which are also a big endocrine organ.

So that interplay has to do with changes in your blood sugar, the things that you eat and trying to control the blood sugar back to normal levels, and it also has to do with making cholesterol, making triglycerides, which are fat molecules that store energy. So yes, if you eat too much sugar or too much carbohydrates, basically, all this energy has to be stored somehow and normally that storage is inside the fat cells or fat droplets, and those can accumulate also inside the liver, and cause what we call fatty liver disease.

Interviewer: So what exactly is happening?