Glucose insulin and diabetes

every cell in the human body needs energy to survive and do it's different functions if we're talking about a brain cell it needs energy to keep stimulating other brain cells and sending on signals and messages if it's a muscle cell it needs energy to contract they need energy just to do the basic functions of a cell and the place that they get that energy from or the primary source of that energy is from glucose glucose and glucose is a simple sugar if you were to actually taste glucose it would taste sweet and glucose gets delivered to cells through the bloodstream so this right here I'm drawing some blood that's passing by a cell maybe the blood is going in that direction over there and inside the blood let me draw some small some small glucose molecules passing by and so in an ideal situation when the cell needs energy glucose will enter the cell so glucose will enter the cell unfortunately it's not that simple for the great majority of cells in the human body the glucose won't enter by itself it needs the assistance of a hormone or molecule called insulin so let me label all of these this right here is glucose and it needs insulin so let me draw insulin as these magenta molecules right over here so that over there that is insulin in sue-lin and the surface of these cells they have insulin receptors on them and I'm destroying very simplified versions of them kind of a place where these magenta circles can can attach combined and what happens is is in order for the glucose to be taken up by the cell insulin has to kind of attach to these receptors which unlocks the channels for glucose in order for the glucose to go in insulin has to bind to the insulin receptors and then once that happens then the glucose can be taken up can be taken up by the cell now unfortunately things don't always work as planned so let me draw a couple of scenarios here so once again let me draw my very simple version of a cell and let me draw the bloodstream going by right over here and then let me draw the glucose in the bloodstream so I have my glucose floating by and then I have my insulin receptors my insulin receptors on the surface of a cell now the first thing that could go wrong here is what if the body does not produce insulin insulin is produced in the pancreas what happens if the pancreas is not producing insulin properly so no no insulin well in this situation since there's nothing to bind to these receptors the glucose channels won't be opened up and the glucose will not be able to enter into the cell and this situation is type 1 diabetes type type 1 diabetes where you've got glucose so in theory you have energy and you have properly functioning insulin receptors but you just don't have insulin to kind of unlock the gates for the glucose for the glucose to actually go into the cell the other scenario that you could imagine happening let me draw the cell again so there's my cell and let me draw the blood flowing past the cell and once again obviously this is just one of trillions of cells in the human body we have an estimated ten to a hundred trillion cells so this is a very simple diagram that hopefully gets the point across so once again let me draw some glucose floating by let me draw some insulin receptors on the cell so insulin receptor there may be an insulin receptor right over there and let's say we even have some insulin so we our pancreas is producing insulin and putting it into our bloodstream so it's there to be used but a situation can arise where the receptors are not working properly or we've become insensitive or desensitized to insulin so the desensitized desensitized receptors so in this situation you have maybe sometimes maybe it might be the insulin it's hard to bind or even if it does bind it's not working function properly so the glucose will not enter the cell and so in either one of the let me I already wrote desensitized so in either one of these scenarios let's just thinking in a very broad level I'm not going to go to the details of the actual para P for these for these diseases of how it can be cured oh and I didn't even name the second one the second one right here as you can imagine if this appears type one diabetes this down here is type two diabetes type type two type two diabetes now the ways the simple way that or I don't want to say it's necessarily simple but the way that you could manage type 1 diabetes is you can inject insulin the only problem here is it's a big one though is that there's no insulin in the bloodstream everything else is working properly so over here we can inject insulin we can inject it and then you'll have insulin to attach to the receptors and then the glucose can be processed properly type 2 diabetes there's kind of multiple lines of attack one thing that you can do there are actually drugs that attempt to kind of re sensitize your insulin receptors you can also do that with a combination of lifestyle changes that makes the makes your body I guess more sensitized to do sugar or you can even and if things get severe enough you can add insulin just like you would do in type 1 diabetes and you can say wait I already have insulin here why would I add more insulin well remember we're not kind of the the cells can process system but they're desensitized they would need more insulin in order to kind of uptake the same amount of glucose so if you add insulin you could possibly have enough enough of a trigger that the glucose can actually be taken up but there's multiple lines of attack here and usually the first one are giving drugs that help hopefully make re sensitize you or make you less desensitized - the actual insulin and so the last thing I just want to think about a little bit is well what happens if you didn't do this well there's two major problems here obviously your cells can't function if it's not picking up glucose so your cells will have no energy and another problem if you if you weren't to manage either one of these types of diabetes is that sugar once it gets to enough if it gets to high enough concentrations in the blood it can actually cause a lot of damage so sugar sugar can cause damage damage to the body so you don't want either of these things happening you want yourselves to have energy and you don't want to have too much sugar flowing in your blood and causing damage to your body