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Comment on What purpose do carbohydrates OTHER than sugars serve in the body?

Gonna try to give a very general ELI5 sort of answer

There’s basically 3 main types of carbohydrates

Simple carbs- basically sugars (mono- and di-saccharides)

Complex carbs- starches, whole grains, etc. (polysaccharides)

Fiber- arguably these are just really complex carbs that your body can’t really break down

In general, sugars are the source of energy your body actually runs on, especially glucose.

Your body can pretty much use simple sugars as-is or can easily break them down into a form it can use. There’s some variation just how quick and easy it is for your body to use different sugars, but in general your body will start to feel the effects of eating sugar in the space of a few minutes, and the effects will peak within about an hour or two.

Complex carbs take a little more digesting to break down into a form your body can make use of. They’re basically being turned into simpler sugars, but that process takes a while. You might hear about athletes carbo-loading with a big spaghetti dinner or something the night before a big competition. The idea there is that the energy from that big, complex carb-heavy dinner won’t really hit them for a few hours or even until the next day, and it will keep providing that energy for a longer period of time.

Fiber is, for the most part, indigestible, your body can’t really break it down into simpler sugars that it can make use of. It goes in your mouth, through your digestive tract, and out the other end relatively unchanged. That doesn’t mean it’s useless though, it still plays an important role in digestion. It takes up space in your stomach helping you feel more full. It absorbs water and helps keep your stool soft and helps waste move through your intestines, and it minds to things like bile acids and cholesterol so that they can be passed as waste.

Again, this is meant to be a very general answer, there’s a lot of details I’m glossing over both just to keep things simple, and because I’m not a doctor or anything of the sort and I’m not 100% sure myself.

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partial_accumen@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

Fiber is, for the most part, indigestible, your body can’t really break it down into simpler sugars that it can make use of.

And just for clarity, just because humans can’t break those down doesn’t mean the entire animal kingdom can’t. So its fiber to us, but usable carbs for lots of other creatures.

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- Fondots@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  True, I did think about mentioning that but decided to skip over it to keep things simple.
  
  Animals like cows for example, can get by almost entirely on fiber. Stuff like grass doesn’t have much in the way of carbs we can use, but it contains a ton of fiber, and cows digestive systems are set up to actually do something with them.
  
  The extra “stomachs” they have allow for some extra fermentation and such to happen so they can break down that fiber into simpler carbs.
  
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Ephera@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
To perhaps lean more into why complex carbs are useful:

Your body can’t really not digest something you’ve eaten. Once it’s in your stomach, it will be broken down and gets put into your blood. With the simple carbs, you get a lot of blood sugar very quickly and your body then has to deal with that. It does so by producing insulin, which tells the rest of your body to take sugar out of the blood. It’s put into either a limited, temporary storage (glycogen) or, once that’s full, into more permanent storage (body fat).
Eating lots of sugar can also lead to your body producing too much insulin, which will cause too much sugar to be taken out of the blood, so you often have a high and then a crash/low after ingesting sugary foods.

Ideally, you want blood sugar to always stay at a reasonable level, where it can supply your brain and muscles, but where your body does not have to start storing lots of it. And that’s where complex carbs are neat, because they don’t get broken down all at once, when they’re in your stomach/intestines, meaning their sugar enters your blood at a more sustainable rate. By eating them instead of sugar, you’re less likely to put on fat and less likely to have a crash.

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