Can someone explain, calories, carbs, glucose, and gluten?

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• modernangel@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Calorie is a measure of how much energy is in a unit of food. Carbs is a shorter word for carbohydrates: energy-rich nutrients made primarily of carbon and hydrogen Glucose is a type of sugar, a simple sugar that releases energy very quickly and easily. Sugars are carbohydrates, but not all carbohydrates are sugars. Gluten is a wheat protein that makes baked goods chewy and coherent instead of crumbly.

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  • Successful_Try543@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Carbs is a shorter word for carbohydrates: energy-rich nutrients made primarily of carbon and hydrogen

    By that definition, fats and oils would be carbohydrates too. Iirc, carbohydrates got their name because they release water when they are heated above a critical temperature while a black carbon residue remains.

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• Depress_Mode@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Calories - the basic unit used to measure dietary energy. The unit used for nutrition (as opposed to Calories used in physics) are actually kilo-Calories, but they’re usually just called calories. Excess calories will be converted and stored as fat.

  Glucose - a simple sugar monosaccharide (just 1 sugar component). There are other basic, simple sugars like galactose, and fructose. Combining two of these simple sugars yields a disaccharide, which is a complex sugar as it requires breaking down into its constituent sugars before it can be digested and absorbed. For example, ordinary table sugar is sucrose (glucose and fructose), but the sugar you find in fruits is just plain old fructose. Sugars, both simple and complex, are carbohydrates. Simple sugars/carbs are quickly digested and absorbed into the blood stream.

  Complex carbohydrates - these are long strings of complex sugars (polysaccharides), such as starch. As a result, they are very calorie dense. Since they are strings of complex sugars, they require even more breaking down before they can be digested than regular disaccharides. They require time to digest fully.

  Gluten - a structural protein formed mainly of the naturally-occurring glutenin and gliaden proteins found in some grains. If you add water and knead wheat flour, like in bread dough, it will form a network of these proteins into gluten. This is what gives bread its elasticity. Around 80% of all the protein in bread is gluten. Because it’s sort of a dietary buzzword, I’ll add that it’s typically perfectly safe to consume unless you’ve been directed by a doctor to avoid it; avoiding it will produce no health benefits at all for the vast majority of people. There is some debate on whether gluten sensitivity truly exists outside of celiac disease (which is autoimmune in nature). Triple-blind experiments where subjects who claimed sensitivity were given high-gluten diets and reported no more symptoms on average than those given low-gluten or gluten-free diets. It’s possible that the true cause of intestinal discomfort for some is instead from a group of compounds called FODMAPs, which are also present in many gluten-containing grains. Follow-up experiments with diets high in FODMAPs with the same group yielded more reporting of symptoms than with the gluten.

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  • HoneyMustardGas@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    This is well put.

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• Fondots@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  This will all be a bit of a simplification

  Calories are a unit of energy. When were talking about food we’re usually talking about kilocalories, in the US we usually just say Calories (with a capital C) some other countries may list them as “kcal.” It’s the same thing, 1000 calories (with a lower case c) is 1 dietary Calorie/kilocalorie. The calorie is defined as the amount of energy it takes to raise 1ml of water 1 degree Celsius. That might feel like a weird way to think about energy from food, but energy is energy, whether you’re using it to think, move, or just keep your body temperature where it’s supposed to be

  The fuels your body uses for most of its energy are sugars. Sugars are a type of carbohydrate, which are chemicals that are basically just chains of different amounts of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen.

  We general group these into 3 main types

  Simple carbs (mono- and di- saccharides)- basically sugars. Glucose is a sugar and the one your body primarily uses, most other carbs basically get broken down into glucose. Sugars are easy for your body to break down and use almost immediately. Sucrose (table sugar) fructose (from plants) maltose, dextrose, lactose, basically anything you might see on a food label that ends in -ose.

  Complex carbs (polysaccharides)- these are things like starches. They’re basically just a bigger molecule that your body needs a little more time to break down into simpler sugars, so you’re not really going to be getting energy from them for a few hours or even the next day. This is why you might hear about athletes “carbo-loading” with something like a big spaghetti dinner the day before a big event, the energy from that dinner will be available to them in time for that event.

  Dietary fiber - these are basically just really complex carbs that your body can’t really break down like cellulose (there’s that -ose ending again.) Some other animals can break them down for energy, like cows do some extra fermentation in their guts which is why they have 4-chambered stomachs that lets them break it down, but we can’t. It’s still important to other aspects of digestion for us but we’re not burning it for fuel.

  Related to that is the glycemic index, which is basically a measure of how fast your body can process those carbs. Sugars have a high glycemic index and raise your blood sugar rapidly. Complex carbs have a lower glycemic index and raise it more gradually.

  It wasn’t part of your question, but I feel like that obviously leads to some discussion about insulin and diabetes. Insulin is a hormone that regulates how fast glucose (which remember is the basic sugar that your body runs on and everything else pretty much gets broken down into) is absorbed from your blood into the rest of your body. People with diabetes don’t produce enough insulin, which means that sugar just kind of builds up in their blood and doesn’t get absorbed by their body, which, putting it mildly, is very bad. Not gonna go into too much detail on that, because it’s outside of the scope of the question, and we’re also dancing around the limits of my own knowledge.

  Also a bit off topic but let’s talk about fat. You’ve eaten more calories than you really need to sustain yourself, what does your body do with the excess energy/sugar? Well it will try to convert some of that sugar into fat to store for later use when you’re getting less calories from your diet that you really need. It’s an emergency store of energy. It’s sort of slow and energy intensive for your body to convert fat back into sugars that it can use, so your body really only starts burning those fat reserves when there’s no other source of energy available.

  Which brings around to the last thing you asked about - gluten. Gluten is a protein found in some grains, when you knead dough made from flour which contains gluten you basically get all of those gluten proteins to get all tangled up and form a stretchy web which makes the dough nice and stretchy, let’s it trap gas bubbles from yeast fermenting or chemical leaveners like baking soda/baking powder, and gives bread a bit of a chewy texture.

  Just like with fat and carbs, your body can break down protein for energy (and it kind of needs other things from proteins, but that’s neither here nor there) and for most people gluten is just fine, not much different than if they were eating meat or beans or other protein-rich foods.

  But some people have medical issues that prevent their bodies from processing gluten properly and eating it makes them sick, so they need to avoid it in their diet.

  Gluten-free foods aren’t necessarily low-carb (or low-calorie,) something like a potato is basically all carbs, but has no gluten.

  But if you’re trying to create a substitute for something that would normally be made with something like wheat flour (which is what most bread and pasta is made from, for example, and has a lot gluten and tons of carbs) one of the obvious ways to do that is by substituting something else for that flour that doesn’t contain gluten, like maybe chickpeas, and most of those substitutes are going to be lower-carb than flour, so most gluten-free substitutes tend to be fairly low carb, which sometimes makes them handy for people who need to reduce how many carbs they’re eating even if they don’t have any real need to avoid gluten.

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• HubertManne@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  @depress_mode@lemmy.world did a good job but I want to add a few things that I think are important.

  Calories - its pretty interesting to compare calories burned sleeeping, sitting, standing, walking, running. You might have encountered the term aerobic excersise and getting a certain heart rate. That is because most of our calorie usage is really about pumping our blood. Not that the heart uses so much but that its the system that feeds us the calories.

  glucose is the sugare that our cells can handle directly. in the hospital you will be given a glucose or dextrose iv when they want to give you calories. the two words are both for the same sugar. you cells metbolize other things but these are usually things your body makes from other types of food during digestion. glucose is sorta the most basic sugar and energy source for your body. that does not mean its healthy though as it actually spikes your blood sugar more than any other.

  carbs sorta come in two varieties. simple ones are very easy to break down into sugars and energy. Like rice, bread, potatoes. Complex are hard to digest ones like fiber and generally help make you feel fuller when you eat and help clean out our system

  I have nothing to add to the gluten part.

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  • Depress_Mode@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Nice additions, thanks! It’s been awhile since my college nutrition class, so maybe I’m misremembering, but is the starch found in bread, potatoes, and rice not a complex carbohydrate after all? Obviously it’ll be digested faster than dietary (insoluble) fiber, which doesn’t digest at all, but I was under the impression starches still don’t finish digesting until it’d been fermented by our gut bacteria in the small intestine.

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    • adespoton@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      They are complex carbohydrates; the starches have to be broken down into sugars before they can be processed by our bodies. That process takes energy, but not as much as processing plant matter or even meat.

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    • HubertManne@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      I was not correcting or anything just adding tidbits I find interesting. Your right carbs go along a spectrum with insoluble acting like a brush that pushes your digestion along and soluble being good at absorbing things and taking it along with it and complex carbs that just don’t digest as easily.

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• hperrin@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Calories are energy. More calories equals more energy. Calorie dense foods tend to be kinda bad for you, but not always. “Empty calories” means calories that don’t have any nutritional value, like alcohol and trans fats. The reason things like Splenda don’t have “calories” isn’t because they don’t have energy. They do. It’s because your body can’t digest them, thus can’t take any of that energy. Therefore, metabolically speaking, it has no calories.

  Carbs are carbohydrates, meaning sugars and starches. This is the kind of food your body directly uses as energy. It can’t be broken down into proteins (because it’s not made of proteins) and it can’t be used to digest fat soluble vitamins (because it’s not fat), it can only be used to provide energy. Your body will either use it as energy or turn it into fat. It is one of four major groups of things your body can digest, carbs, fats, proteins, and alcohols. (You need vitamins too, but you don’t really digest them, so they don’t have calories.)

  Glucose is a simple sugar. Unlike starches, your body doesn’t need to break it down to use it. Your cells can directly use it. Great for if you need an energy boost during vigorous exercise.

  Gluten is a protein mostly found in grains. Your body will break it down into amino acids and use it to make the proteins it needs.

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  A lot of nutritional advice is over complicated. The best advice I’ve ever heard comes Dr Steven Novella:

  “Eat a varied diet, mostly plants.”

  Another thing is that if you’re talking about weight loss (and only weight loss), the only thing that matters is calories in to calories out. If you are on a calorie deficit (disregarding severe medical conditions), you will lose weight. If you eat at a calorie surplus (again, disregarding medical conditions, like the inability to digest food), you will gain weight. You can lose weight eating nothing but chocolate cake and Cheetos. You will be wildly unhealthy and feel like shit, but you will weigh less.

  For the most part, you don’t need to worry about eating the right things, as long as you aren’t eating the wrong things. (Fast food and snacks are generally bad for you in excess.)

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• silly_goose@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  tldr:

  Calories: Amount of energy in food.

  Carbs: An energy source that is abundant in plant food.

  Glucose: Most carbs are digested into glucose. It gets absorbed by each cell and burned into energy.

  Gluten: A protein in wheat that makes the dough stretchy. Causes gut issues for some people.

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