Food, the Body's Fuel and Energy Source

When you eat food, either salad, burger, sandwich, or my favorite Garri and Fish, one thing we would get from it is fuel, to keep us alive and active. When we all eat food, the body slowly breaks down the basic molecules of the food into nutrients which would in turn supply the body with the energy needed.

Have you noticed that when you are hungry especially in a state of fasting, you are unable to do anything. When I am terribly hungry, I start to lose energy to do simple things like laying down comfortably so this explains its importance in your daily activities including playing, running, lifting weight, and doing every other activity.

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You then begin to wonder how the body uses this food for energy after consuming it, well the answer is cellular respiration which is the process by which the cells in the body converts the food we eat into energy through a process. The animals in your surrounding just like yourself breath in oxygen while the eat food to produce ATP along side with carbon dioxide which is a waste product and water.

We are not the only living organisms that can produce ATP, so before you start to think that you are the only that needs energy, some organisms such as bacteria produces ATP eve without the presence of oxygen in what is known as Anaerobic respiration.

I suspect some of you are lost with the terms used like ATP so hold on and let me explain it to you. ATP which you can refer to as Adenosine Triphosphate is the cell's energy currency, you know like the dollar you spend, ATP is the cells currency in exchange for energy and ATP stores energy through the three phosphates at the back of the adenosine molecule. When energy is released, ATP becomes ADP which is recycled again to form ATP by adding another phosphate to the group.

Our entire body utilizes ATP and the brain itself relies solely on sugar and when the body is out of sugar like the days when you are hungry, your body then runs to the body's fat store to utilize fat as energy source but then my friend, if you are one who wants to emulate the biblical Jesus where you fast for 40 days and Night, your body would resort to protein as its last choice.

In that your body just like mine, when you consume glucose, one glucose molecule can give about 32 molecules of ATP during cellular respiration. When you eat that delicious food, glucose in your body can become ATP through glycolysis, kreb cycle, and oxidative phosphorylation. With glycolysis, the digestive system breaks down our food into smaller nutrients and glucose makes it way into the cells and glycolysis takes place there breaking down six-carbon glucose into two three-carbon molecules known as Pyruvate and ATP.

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With kreb cycle, the pyruvate goes to the mitochondria where it is converted to Acetyl CoA in the Matrix of the mitochondria. All this happens in your body just like it is in mine and not in a test tube. The Acetyl CoA then enters the Kreb Cycle where it reacts with Oxaloacetate to create citric acid along with a series of 8 reactions that occurs with carbon dioxide and water being a byproducts. The kreb cycle creates two molecules that are important for our body which are NADH (Niacin) and FADH2 (Riboflavin). In the case of oxidative phosphorylation, the two molecules donate their electrons to the electron transport chain. Where ATP syntase balances the gradient into ATP.

The entire jargon I just wrote above isn't possible without oxygen as it would make the entire system stuck and energy not released through the method and this is why Cyanide is deadly because when a person is poisoned with it, it goes on to block the electron transfer to oxygen.

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Reference

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https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK7919/
https://www.amybrownscience.com/2012/01/cellular-respiration-powerpoint.html
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK553175/
https://www.britannica.com/science/adenosine-triphosphate
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK26882/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK556032/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8157914/