Let's delve into carbohydrates in a little bit more detail. Why is it important to know about carbs? If you want to lose weight, or processed food like a slim person, one of the greatest impacts on weight gain and weight loss is carbohydrate metabolism. So understanding what happens in the body will help you make healthy choices with regard to what you choose to eat. Now, we all know where carbohydrates come from all those yummy foods that we love so much. But veggies, salads and fruit are also carbohydrates.
Some foods have a more immediate and greater impact on your body or on your sugars than others. So when a whole meal comes in and contain some carbohydrates, the body is going to use the carbs first, as its choice of fuel. Why Do this. So if you're looking at breads and sugars, you eat a meal, the braids, the sugars and the veggies are broken down over varying times into glucose. And because for the body and the mitochondria, glucose is very easily converted to ATP, and the body is fundamentally very lazy, it's going to choose the path of least resistance, which is glucose, so that glucose is going to be burned before the fats. So carbs are first broken down in our digestive tract into glucose, which flows into the bloodstream from the gut.
But to get the glucose from the blood into the cells and then into the mitochondria. The body needs a special carrier hormone called insulin. In this day and age, everybody's heard of insulin, and insulin has two main roles. The first role is to carry the glucose into And the second role is to instruct the body where to store the energy. Insulin is all about storing energy. So let's look at the first role.
We'll create a little vision here. You have a lovely healthy body, eat a plate of food that has protein, fats and carbohydrates, and the food is digested. The carbs flow into the beds, the bloodstream in the form of glucose. And just imagine this. The glucose, of course, is needed in the cells so it rushes to the cells and it's hammering on the cell door, but nothing happens. This is because the cell does not recognize glucose in itself, as having a key to get in.
Early insulin has got the key to get into the cells. So in a healthy body, incident picks up the glucose takes it to the cell and because incident has got a key, it's able to open a cell door and escort the glucose in fat. So, incident is very important for glucose metabolism. If you look at the second role of incident incident also police's, where glucose is going to be stored. It directs the glucose into the liver for storage into the muscles for storage and interface. So with just the right amount of food coming in about 55% goes to the liver for later use.
About 40% goes to the muscles for muscle power, and about 5% goes straight to fit. Both the liver and the muscles have limited storage capacity. So when they're full, the body is going to store more glucose as fat