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MCAT
Course: MCAT > Unit 5
Lesson 16: Fat and protein metabolism- Fat and protein metabolism questions
- Introduction to energy storage
- Digestion, Mobilization, and Transport of Fats - Part I
- Digestion, Mobilization, and Transport of Fats - Part II
- Fatty Acid Synthesis - Part I
- Fatty Acid Synthesis - Part II
- Overview of Fatty Acid Oxidation
- Fatty Acid Oxidation - Part I
- Fatty Acid Oxidation - Part II
- How does the body adapt to starvation?
- Overview of Amino Acid Metabolism
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How does the body adapt to starvation?
1D: How does the body utilize the major energy storage fuels? What are ketones? Why can't fatty acids be converted to glucose? Created by Jasmine Rana.
Want to join the conversation?
- Im sorry if this has been covered somewhere else.. i have been watching so many of these videos...
I am uncertain as to why gluconeogenesis is necessary if fats can produce ATP through another mechanism... isn't that the main reason we produce glucose to begin with?(17 votes)- I think it might be because some cells in our body, like in the brain, can only get their energy from glucose, so gluconeogenesis is required since those areas cannot turn other molecules into ATP. There may be more reasons than that but that's one reason that I know of.(47 votes)
- why would you want to convert ketones back into acetyl-coa i thought the krebs cycle slowed so it didn't need as much acetyl coa? 13:59(13 votes)
- Acetyl CoA can feed into the TCA cycle when produced from ketolysis in the brain. It is crucial to keep the cycle going to generate neurotransmitters (e.g. GABA). By regenerating the Acetyl CoA molecules from ketolysis, the brain is generating the requisite materials to keep the TCA cycle going.(7 votes)
- the subtitles used to say "Crap Cycle" 4:33the subtitles now says "Krebs Cycle" 4:33(15 votes)
- Why do pictures of starving children show them with protruding abdomens?(4 votes)
- I still am not sure why the Acetyl CoA formed from Fatty Acids can't enter the Krebs Cycle and be used for gluconeogenesis? The video states atthat the Acetyl CoA would lose 2 carbon molecules as 2CO2, and so you don't have a net production of carbons anywhere in the cycle. However, she states later on, at 7:20, that the Acetyl CoA formed from ketone bodies in the brain can enter the Krebs Cycle. Does this mean that the brain doesn't rely on gluconeogenesis during starvation, and that it only relies on ATP production from the Krebs Cycle? I thought that the brain needed to rely on glucose to survive. 14:00(9 votes)
- Acetyl CoA can neither be converted to pyruvate nor OAA which are required for gluconeogenesis. The conversion of pyruvate to acetyl CoA by PDH is irreversible and the two carbons of acetyl CoA leave the Krebs cycle as 2CO2 and so cannot be used to regenerate OAA.
She does say that the brain relies on gluconeogenesis during the first 2-3 days of starvation but switches to ketones as it's source of fuel so that the body saves its store of amino acids. Ketones, unlike FA, are hydrophilic and can cross the blood-brain barrier. That's why the brain can reconvert them to acetyl CoA and ultimately produce ATP.
Yes, the brain needs glucose to survive, but not exclusively. In times of starvation, it switches to the 'next best thing' so that it survives.(3 votes)
- Sorry, but i don't understand, why fatty acid can not make gluconeogenesis?(9 votes)
- The conversion of pyruvate to acetyl-coA via pyruvate dehydrogenase is completely irreversible, so acetyl-coA can't simply enter gluconeogenesis as pyruvate. However, ketone bodies/amino acids that are converted to true TCA cycle intermediates are essentially equivalent (via a turn of the TCA cycle) to oxaloacetate, which can enter gluconeogenesis.(30 votes)
- @I am still a little confused as to why there would be an increase in ATP during starvation. If high ATP prevents acetyl CoA form entering the Krebs cycle because there is enough ATP, why would ketone bodies be synthesized? 12:50(2 votes)
- The reason is because the ATP made from fatty acids cannot be used by the brain since fatty acids can't cross the blood brain barrier. Ketone bodies are synthesized from fatty acids for the brain because they can cross the blood brain barrier. The brain can only use glucose and ketones for energy, but since glucose levels are low and the body wants to prevent protein degradation, the liver will make ketones for the brain. The ketones reach the brain where they are converted back into acetyl-CoA and broken down through Krebs and ETC for ATP.(12 votes)
- so basically Ketones are just intermediary molecules that get produced by breaking down amino acids, and that are changed back into Acetyl-CoA to be used in the mitochondria of cells that don't have glucose?(3 votes)
- I thought ketones were made using Acetyl-CoA. I also though the purpose of making ketones was to save proteins from being broken down?(3 votes)
- I am confused, because FA's can convert to acetyl coA and then enter TCA. What is the difference if AA's convert to acetyl coA? How is it that these acetyl CoA from AA's cannot enter TCA? You mentioned those carbons would be released as carbon dioxide, and would not be able to form oxaloacetate. This doesn't make sense to me.(1 vote)
- I think that the AAs that enter the Krebs cycle (TCA) as Acetyl CoA do follow the same fate as FA's that enter as Acetyl CoA. On the other hand AAs can also enter the TCA as a 6-C (intermediate) molecule and so even though they do lose the 2-C's as CO2 the other 4-C's left turn into OAA which can be used in Gluconeogenisis. Hope this helps :)(6 votes)
- Fantastic video. One quick question: I thought the brain and RBCs need to use glucose to function (especially RBCs as they have no mitochondria for Kreb's Cycle and ETC). Can you help clarify this? Thank you.(3 votes)
Video transcript
- [Instructor] In this video, I want to explore the question of how does our body adapt to periods of prolonged starvation. So in order to answer this question, I actually think it's helpful
to remind ourselves first of a golden rule of
homeostasis inside of our body. So in order to survive, remember that our body
must be able to maintain proper blood glucose levels. I'm gonna go ahead and write we must be able to maintain
glucose levels in our blood, and this is important even in periods of prolonged starvation, because it turns out
that we need to maintain glucose levels above a
certain concentration in order to survive, even if that concentration
is lower than normal. And this of course brings up the question, well, how does our body
maintain blood glucose levels? So let's go ahead and answer this question by starting off small. Let's say we have a
mini case of starvation, let's say three or four
hours after a meal. Your blood glucose levels begin to drop, and so what does your
body do to resolve that? Well, at this point, it has a quick and easy solution. It turns to its glycogen
stores in the liver. Remember that our body
stores up these strings of glucose inside of our body so that we can easily pump it back into the blood when we're not eating. But unfortunately humans only have enough glycogen stores
to last us about a day, so after a day of starvation, our body's pretty much reliant exclusively on the metabolic pathways
involved in gluconeogenesis, which if you remember is the pathway by which we produce new or neo glucose. And we produce this glucose
from non-carbohydrate precursor molecules. So let's think about what
else we have in our body. Remember that our other
two major storage fuels are fats, and we usually think about fatty acids containing most
of that kind of energy, and we also have amino acids. So I want to talk about
both of these fuels in turn and how and if they can
contribute to gluconeogenesis. Now even if you forget most
of what I say in this video, try and remember just
this one next key point, which is that the breakdown
products of fatty acids cannot be converted, for the most part, into glucose. So they can't contribute
to gluconeogenesis. On the other hand, the breakdown products of the
catabolism of amino acids can. So to talk about why this is the case, I want to remind you of the Krebs cycle and gluconeogenesis and how
these two cycles are connected. Remember that the major breakdown product of the oxidation of fatty acids in a molecule called acetyl-CoA, and this is a very special molecule because it represents the entry
point into the Krebs cycle. Remember that it combines with a four-carbon molecule
called oxaloacetate, which we usually abbreviate here as OAA, and it is turned into this
molecule called citrate, and of course there are
many, many other conversions that I'm not gonna write, but the gist of the Krebs cycle is that we end up cycling
back to oxaloacetate, which means that we lose those two carbons that we added in the form of
acetyl-CoA into carbon dioxide. All right, so fairly simple enough, right? We end up producing these
acetyl-CoA molecules from the oxidation of fatty acids, which cycle through this Krebs cycle, allowing us to produce all of those electron carrier molecules
like NADH and FADH2, which end up contributing
to the production of ATP in the electron transport chain. But how does this all connect up with and implicated with this
gluconeogenesis process? So let me remind that you that generally, remember, we think about gluconeogenesis as essentially being the
reverse of glycolysis minus a couple of steps that we have to change around a little bit because some steps in
glycolysis are irreversible. But largely we can think about it as the reverse of glycolysis, and remember that the
end product of glycolysis was this molecule called pyruvate, right? And so somehow we can
funnel things into pyruvate, and if we end up getting
this molecule pyruvate, through the process of gluconeogenesis we can actually convert it to a molecule called oxaloacetate,
which should ring a bell, because remember it's also
in this Krebs cycle here, and then we can also then eventually turn it back into phosphoenolpyruvate, another molecule also found in glycolysis, and then we essentially
run this entire sequence of glycolysis pretty much backward with changing around a
couple of enzymes, of course, and eventually we get
back to producing glucose. All right, so now here's the reason why amino acids can contribute to this pathway of gluconeogenesis
but fatty acids can't. It turns out that the catabolism, the breakdown of amino acids allows these breakdown products to be turned into some
of the intermediates along the Krebs cycle. So I'm just kind of drawing arrows loosely because I know I haven't written out the specific names of the molecules, but suffice to say the big picture is that we're able to get
these amino acids converted to these intermediates. And what's really cool is that we know that this molecule oxaloacetate is eventually what these
intermediates are going to become, and we also know that oxaloacetate is a compound in gluconeogenesis, and in fact, we can even shuttle this even more directly to be converted right into phosphoenolpyruvate right here. And so that's how these amino acids eventually get into this
gluconeogenesis pathway. Likewise, amino acids can also, when they're broken down, also be converted into pyruvate as well, which from this diagram I've shown you also allows them to contribute to this production of glucose. Now even though all
the ATP that's produced by this acetyl-CoA molecule from the oxidation of fatty acids might be fueling this anabolic
reaction of gluconeogenesis, because remember anabolic
reactions require ATP, this acetyl-CoA molecule in itself has no place to enter this
gluconeogenesis pathway. Remember that pyruvate can be converted to acetyl-CoA using the
enzyme pyruvate dehydrogenase. But the thermodynamics of
this chemical reaction, the delta G value for this
reaction is very negative, and so this forward
reaction is irreversible. In other words, just to
make this super clear, we cannot go the opposite direction. We cannot go from acetyl-CoA to pyruvate. And so acetyl-CoA cannot enter
the gluconeogenesis pathway. Now I remember when I was
first learning about this that part made sense, but what didn't make sense
to me was how acetyl-CoA, it looked like acetyl-CoA could eventually be converted to oxaloacetate, and then from here it seemed to me that we could enter the
gluconeogenesis pathway right here. But I want to remind you
that remember the two carbons that were in acetyl-CoA molecule here, we end up losing those two carbons in these molecules of carbon dioxide. So even though our diagram
looks a bit misleading in that we can kind of follow acetyl-CoA's journey to oxaloacetate, you just have to remember that you know that these two carbons, we end up not having a
net production of carbons anywhere along this cycle
because these two carbons end up exiting as carbon
dioxide molecules. Now a couple minor points
that I do want to mention are that it turns out that
there are some fatty acids, specifically odd-chain fatty acids, that can contribute in some way to the Krebs cycle like these amino acids. So some portion of these
odd-chain fatty acids can be converted to intermediates in the Krebs cycle and be
used for gluconeogenesis, but on the whole we generally
consider fatty acids not to contribute to gluconeogenesis because we think about acetyl-CoA being the primary product of
fatty acid synthesis. And the next point that I
actually want to make as well is it turns out that
there are some amino acids that can also be converted
directly into acetyl-CoA, and so I'd ask you the question would these amino acids be able to contribute to gluconeogenesis? So think about that for a moment. Now of course the answer
to that question is as long as those amino acids don't have any way to
contribute to any of these intermediates in the Krebs cycle, it's just like the
situation for fatty acids. Because we're ultimately
turning into acetyl-CoA, there's no way for
acetyl-CoA to contribute to this pathway of gluconeogenesis. So these amino acids, if they're exclusively being
turned into acetyl-CoA, cannot contribute to gluconeogenesis. All right, so this
seems all fine and good. We have a solution, right? We're able to use amino acids to eventually produce glucose
through gluconeogenesis, but what might be a potential
pitfall of using amino acids? Because remember that proteins are vital molecules inside of our cell. Many of these proteins have functions inside of our cells. Many of these are enzymes that carry out important processes and
proteins often comprise the bulk of our muscles. So you can imagine that using
all of these amino acids and breaking them down would be bad for our survival as a species because of course we need our muscle mass to be able to move around and we need our enzymes to be performing their activities inside of our cell. So that's why in states
of prolonged starvation, our body comes up with
another golden rule, which is to save our protein. We don't want to waste our protein in the production of glucose. And luckily for us, many of the tissues in our body that rely exclusively on glucose for the production of energy, such as the brain, because
remember fatty acids can't cross the blood-brain barrier, many of these tissues tend to be a little bit more flexible
for us in times of starvation and they start using a different fuel that our body switches to making several days after
starvation called ketones. And for the brain in particular, these ketones are effective,
unlike fatty acids, because these ketones
are water soluble enough to cross the blood-brain barrier and allow us to produce
ATP in times of starvation. All right, so what's the big
picture idea behind ketones and how does ketone
synthesis save our proteins? So to describe this, I want to go ahead and
make some more room here to draw out a flow chart to remind you what happens when our body
is subjected to starvation. Remember that our hormones
are the orchestrators of all metabolic pathways, and so let's remind ourselves what happens to our hormones in times of fasting. Remember, glucagon levels begin to rise because they're sensing we have low blood glucose in our blood, and insulin levels, which only respond of course to high blood
glucose levels, begin to drop. And this stimulates our body to start breaking down fatty
acids in fatty acid oxidation, which occurs primarily in the liver, and as we talked about above, this ultimately leads to having a lot of acetyl-CoA molecules. And in the beginning, you know, about, you know, maybe three to four hours after our last meal and up to a day, our body is working on building
up these acetyl-CoA stores so that they can enter the Krebs cycle to eventually produce the
electron carrier molecules that will allow us to produce ATP in the electron transport chain. So that's kind of our main goal in these first kind of one
or two days of fasting. However, about two to
three days after fasting, the levels of acetyl-CoA
inside of your body begin to rise above the
amount that you need to maintain ATP levels, and the reason why this is able to happen is for several reasons. One thing to recognize is
that most metabolic pathways we've talked about have
some form of regulation, some form of product inhibition, but it turns out that there is
no type of product inhibition when it comes to fatty acid oxidation. So normally we might think that rising levels of
acetyl-CoA would signal somehow the body to decrease fatty acid oxidation, but this does not occur. There is no type of product inhibition. So acetyl-CoA levels can
continue to rise, essentially. In addition, remember that
one of the biggest regulators of metabolic pathways in our body is ATP, and if we have enough fatty acid oxidation to produce enough ATP in our cells and ATP levels are plenty, it'll essentially feed back onto the electron transport chain to say hey, slow down. And if the flux through the electron transport chain is slower, than that will lead to an increase in the amount of our reduced
electron carrier molecules, like NADH, for example, because these won't be donating electrons into the electron transport chain as fast. And remember that NADH is
one of the biggest regulators of the Krebs cycle, and so if we have a lot of NADH, it will slow flow through the Krebs cycle. And so the acetyl-CoA
molecule will no longer want to enter the Krebs cycle as much, and that is what allows our body to shunt this extra
acetyl-CoA that develops after about two or
three days of starvation into the production of ketones, and this occurs mainly
inside of the liver. Now of course just to bring
this story full circle, the big idea here is that these ketones can then leave the liver, go into the bloodstream, and other tissues like the brain can take out these ketones and convert them back to acetyl-CoA, and of course we know then that acetyl-CoA can enter the Krebs cycle like this and contribute to the production of ATP. Moreover, as the body shifts several days after starvation to this
new fuel of using ketones, it puts less pressure on the body to undergo gluconeogenesis. And if there's less pressure
to undergo gluconeogenesis, there will be less pressure for our body to break down protein. And so actually it turns out that the majority of protein breakdown occurs in the first couple, first two to three days of starvation, but after that, protein degradation, the rate of protein
degradation will decrease because our body is shifting to use more of these ketones as an energy fuel.