Diabetes

Diabetes is a group of metabolic diseases in which a person has a high sugar concentration in their blood. People with diabetes are impaired in their ability to metabolize glucose, a sugar needed by the body for energy; as a result, excessive quantities of glucose accumulate in the blood and the urine. Diabetes may be caused by insufficient insulin production by the pancreas or by the body’s cells not responding properly to the insulin that is produced. In a healthy person, insulin is produced when it is needed and functions to transport glucose from the blood into the cells where it can be used for energy.

The characteristic symptoms of diabetes are weight loss, constant hunger, extreme thirst, and frequent urination (the kidneys excrete large amounts of water in an attempt to remove the excess sugar from the blood). The long-term complications of diabetes can include loss of eyesight, heart disease, and kidney failure. In 2013, it was estimated that approximately 3.3% of the world’s population (~380 million people) suffered from diabetes, resulting in over a million deaths annually. Prevention involves eating a healthy diet, getting plenty of exercise, and maintaining a normal body weight. Treatment involves all of these lifestyle practices and may require injections of insulin.

Even after treatment protocols were introduced, the need to continually monitor their glucose levels posed a challenge for people with diabetes. The first tests required a doctor or lab, and therefore limited access and frequency. Eventually, researchers developed small tablets would react to the presence of glucose in urine, but these still required a relatively complex process. Chemist Helen Free, who was working on improvements to the tablets, conceived a simpler device: a small test strip. With her husband and research partner, Alfred Free, she produced the first such product for measuring glucose; soon after, she expanded the technology to provide test strips for other compounds and conditions. While very recent advances (such as breath tests) have shown promise in replacing test strips, they have been widely used for decades and remain a primary method today.

This is a diagram of a hand with a blood droplet on an index finger and a nearby sharp pointed pen-like object. The finger is next shown touching a white and green test strip with arrows pointing to the green region where the bloody finger touches the strip. An arrow points to a small rectangular device in which the green end of the strip is inserted. An L C D display provides a reading.
Diabetes is a disease characterized by high concentrations of glucose in the blood. Treating diabetes involves making lifestyle changes, monitoring blood-sugar levels, and sometimes insulin injections. (credit: “Blausen Medical Communications”/Wikimedia Commons)

Glucose is one of the carbohydrates you will learn about in this chapter as we begin to study the chemistry of molecules found in food. Later we will study the other two major types of macromolecules found in foods: fats/oils and proteins.


Attributions

This page is based on “Chemistry 2e” by Paul Flowers, Klaus Theopold, Richard Langley, William R. Robinson, PhDOpenstax which is licensed under CC BY 4.0. Access for free at https://openstax.org/books/chemistry-2e/pages/1-introduction

This page is based on “The Basics of General, Organic, and Biological Chemistry” by David W Ball, John W Hill, Rhonda J ScottSaylor which is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Access for free at http://saylordotorg.github.io/text_the-basics-of-general-organic-and-biological-chemistry/index.html

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Chemistry of Food and Cooking Copyright © 2022 by Jessica Wittman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.