AN OVERVIEW OF FAT CELL FUNCTION

May
08
2009

Posted by: admin in Categories: Weight Loss.
Using Tags: Weight Loss

Ignoring protein and alcohol, fat is carried in the bloodstream in the form of free fatty acids (FFAs) which have been broken down from triglycerides (TGs) from food and fat stores. The other main source of energy is sugar (glucose). Glucose is used up readily in muscle tissue as energy when it is available in significant amounts, such as after a meal (hence the thick arrow from glucose to the muscle). Otherwise, the muscle uses FFAs as its main source of energy (such as after overnight fasting, in which case there would be a thick arrow from FFAs to the muscle). FFAs are efficiently stored as triglycerides in the fat cell. The obligatory biochemical cost of storage of fat as body fat is about 3 per cent of the energy available in the fat. The cost of converting glucose to fat on the other hand (de novo lipogenesis) is around 25 per cent of the available energy in the carbohydrate, which helps to explain why de novo lipogenesis is now not thought to occur significantly in humans under normal physiological conditions i.e. non-forced feeding of carbohydrate.