Glucose - The Mystery Of This Required Sugar - # 177 The Horse's Advocate Podcast

Glucose is one of many sugars. It is an essential nutrient for both horses and people. When talking about sugar in food, you might hear words like carbs, starch, fructose, lactose, saccharide, or others. But for now, let's just focus on glucose. Without it, our horses—and we—cannot survive. Yet glucose damages everything it touches inside the body! It is so harmful that the phrase "glucose disposal" is often used to describe how the body protects itself from glucose. Insulin helps the body remove glucose. Without insulin, glucose levels rise in the bloodstream, harming whatever they come into contact with. To control blood glucose levels, cells respond to insulin. When a cell takes in as much glucose as it can, it stops responding to insulin. This is normal and needed for the complex process to work. If insulin resistance happens every day, why is it a problem when your horse has it? That's what this podcast is about. I'll explain how the body uses glucose, how it protects itself, and when insulin resistance becomes a real issue.