Glucose facts for kids
Glucose is a simple carbohydrate, also known as a type of sugar. It's super important because cells in every living thing use it to get energy. This process of turning glucose into energy is called cellular respiration, and it happens inside the cells of an organism.
Plants make glucose through a process called photosynthesis. Animals, including humans, can also make glucose in their liver or kidneys.
It's really important to have the right amount of glucose in your body. Doctors can check your glucose levels with a simple blood test. If someone doesn't have enough glucose, it's called hypoglycemia (low blood sugar). If they have too much, it's called hyperglycemia, which can be a sign of diabetes.
Glucose has a chemical formula of C6H12O6. This means each glucose molecule is made of 6 carbon atoms, 12 hydrogen atoms, and 6 oxygen atoms all bonded together.
A German chemist named Emil Fischer studied how sugars work and how glucose is formed in the 1890s. He even won the 1902 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his amazing work!
Contents
How Glucose Powers Your Body
Glucose is a main fuel source for almost all living things, from tiny bacteria to humans. It's used to create energy through processes like aerobic respiration (which uses oxygen) or anaerobic respiration and fermentation (which don't). For humans, glucose is the main way our bodies get energy. One gram of glucose gives us about 3.75 kilocalories (16 kilojoules) of food energy.
When you eat carbohydrates like starch, your body breaks them down into simpler sugars, mostly glucose. This glucose then goes through a series of steps, including glycolysis and parts of the citric acid cycle, to produce ATP. ATP is like the energy currency of your cells. Your body has special ways, like the hormone insulin, to control how much glucose is in your blood.
Glucose and Your Brain
Your brain needs a lot of energy, and almost all of it comes from glucose! So, if your glucose levels are low, it can affect how well your brain works. Things like self-control and making tough decisions can become harder.
Because glucose is so important for health, it's often checked in common medical blood tests. If you have high glucose levels after not eating for a while (fasting), it could be a sign of prediabetes or diabetes mellitus.
Glucose in Medicine
Managing Blood Sugar Levels
Diabetes is a health condition where the body struggles to control glucose levels in the blood. This can happen if the body doesn't make enough insulin, or if the cells don't respond well to the insulin that is made. Both situations can lead to blood glucose levels that are too high for too long.
Treating Low Blood Sugar
People with diabetes or other conditions that cause low blood sugar often carry small amounts of sugar with them. Glucose is a common choice, often found in the form of glucose tablets (which are glucose pressed into a pill shape), hard candy, or sugar packets. These can quickly help raise blood sugar levels when they get too low.
Images for kids
-
Mutarotation of glucose
-
Glucose can exist in both a straight-chain and ring form.
-
Widely proposed arrow-pushing mechanism for acid-catalyzed dynamic equilibrium between the α- and β- anomers of D-glucopyranose
-
Mutarotation: d-glucose molecules exist as cyclic hemiacetals that are epimeric (= diastereomeric) to each other. The epimeric ratio α:β is 36:64. In the α-D-glucopyranose (left), the blue-labelled hydroxy group is in the axial position at the anomeric centre, whereas in the β-D-glucopyranose (right) the blue-labelled hydroxy group is in equatorial position at the anomeric centre.
-
Glucose-Fructose-Mannose-isomerisation
-
Diagram showing the possible intermediates in glucose degradation; Metabolic pathways orange: glycolysis, green: Entner-Doudoroff pathway, phosphorylating, yellow: Entner-Doudoroff pathway, non-phosphorylating
-
Glucose, 5% solution for infusions
-
Relative sweetness of various sugars in comparison with sucrose
See also
In Spanish: Glucosa para niños
