Fat vs Carbohydrates

Why Does Our Body Likes Fat More Than Carbohydrates?

Carbohydrates’ Role

Unless you are following a low-carb diet, the bulk of your daily diet likely comes from hcarbohydrates. Carbohydrates are found in a lot of foods, like bread, pasta, vegetables and fruits. When you eat carbs, your body gets to work breaking them down into simple sugars, such as glucose, which easily passes into your bloodstream. The first thing your body will do with blood glucose is burn it up for energy. Extra glucose that your body doesn’t need for immediate energy will go into storage. A small amount will be stored as glycogen, which is a stored form of glucose in your muscles and liver. Once this storage area is filled up, the remaining glucose gets converted to fat, which is essentially long-term energy storage.

It is kind of like glucose is a car looking for a parking place. The first glucose cars that arrive get the best spots right up next to the action. The next group of cars has to park a bit farther away in the liver and muscles, the glycogen parking lot. Whereas the last glucose cars to arrive need to travel to the long-term energy storage lot, known as body fat. And they have to travel to this long-term parking area via the lipogenesis access road. While it doesn’t seem convenient to make carbs go through this conversion so they can be stored as fat, your body doesn’t mind. In fact, it likes to store energy as fat because lipids can store more energy, or calories, per gram than carbohydrates. We see that every gram of fat contains 9 calories/gram, whereas carbohydrates only hold 4 calories/gram. So believe it or not, fat is the most compact and efficient storage form when it comes to energy.

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