NUTRIENT CHEMISTRY You Are What You Eat (With a Few Hundred Chemical Reactions in Between)

NUTRIENT CHEMISTRY You are what you eat (with a few hundred chemical reactions in between). NUTRIENTS

Nutritive chemicals allow burning in your body.

OK, actually it’s oxidation - very slow burning.

OK, OK, actually it’s called metabolism - you’re oxidizing bio-chemicals.

The goal is to release energy to be used for heat and motion.

This energy is measured in calories. BIOLOGICAL FUEL

Your body burns glucose, a single-ring sugar.

It can get glucose from other sugars (fructose, lactose, sucrose, etc.)

It can get glucose from starches

Sugars, starches, cellulose and fiber are all carbohydrates BIOFUEL STORAGE

Fats are a way for your body to store energy if it has too many sugars and starches to use immediately.

Your body stores enough glucose (and glycogen) to run 20 miles, bicycle 60 miles... then you run out and start burning fats.

You have a fixed number of fat cells, they grow and shrink with fat as needed. FATS AND OILS

Fatty acids are the building blocks of fats, oils and waxes.

They are collections of long chains of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen.

Since they are acids they can react in a number of ways with other chemicals.

If they have as many hydrogens bonded to the carbons as they can, they are “saturated” fats.

For scale, 1 lb of butter is 1 lb of animal fat. PROTEINS

Can be structural (hair, nails, collagen, cartilage, etc... the materials)

Can be functional enzymes (that make other things - the machines that make the parts of living things)

They are made of amino acids

DNA codes for RNA that codes for Amino Acids

Protein to amino acid is digestion

Amino acid to protein is synthesis NON-CALORIC NUTRIENTS

Water! You use or produce water in many bio-chemical reactions.

Minerals - nerves need Calcium, Sodium, blood needs Iron, DNA needs Phosphorus, etc.

Vitamins - VITal chemicals, originally thought to be AMINes, are used by enzymes to complete reactions. BUILDING BLOCKS

Obviously you don’t eat chicken wings and get chicken meat protein taking the place of your hair or nails (eeeeewww!).

Protein is broken down into amino acids and then used to create the proteins you need.

Fats and oils are broken down into fatty acids and then used to make the fats used by your body to store energy.

Carbohydrates are broken down into simple sugars and then used to make other sugars or burned as fuel. These are the pathways that link the most common biochemicals. Do not study this. Appreciate it. CALORIC NUTRIENTS

Generate heat for reactions and energy for motion, measured in calories.

1 food Calorie is the amount of heat needed to rise the temperature of 1 liter of water by 1°C.

Carbohydrates can create 4 calories for every gram

Proteins can create 4 calories for every gram

Fats can create 9 calories for every gram CALORIC NEEDS AND USES

A human needs 15 food calories per pound of body weight every day just to function.

So a 100 lb person needs 100 x 15 = 1,500 calories per day to stay the same weight.

Eat more, and your body will store the extra as weight.

Eat less and your body will burn the stored weight. ADDING OR LOSING?

You need 3,600 food calories to create a pound of body weight.

Eat 3,600 more calories than you need and you gain a pound.

Spend 3,600 more calories than you need and you lose a pound. SPENDING CALORIES IN EXERCISE

If you bicycle 15 miles per hour and weigh 10 lbs, you burn 600 calories in an hour. Do that 6 days a week and don’t change your diet, and you will lose 6 x 600 = 3,600 calories per week. That’s the amount in 1 pound of body weight.

In the Tour de France, cyclists burn about 1,200 calories per hour, four hours per day for 21 days. That’s 100,800 calories, or the equivalent of losing 28 lbs of body weight, or eating 373 jelly doughnuts! (of course they eat more every day and their weight stays the same). WHAT’S IT WORTH?

So what’s the effect of eating - say - just one more slice of bread than you need every day?

Most bread is about 100 calories per slice. If you eat one of those a day more than you need, for a year, that’s 365 x 100 = 36,500 calories. Since 3,600 calories create a pound of body weight, that’s 36,500 / 3,600 or 10 lbs of body weight.

Healthy nutrition includes balancing food intake and energy burned through exercise.