Peter Attia· MD
the first is what we call oxidative the second is glycolytic and the third is glycogen so let's take each of those in order the oxidative fate of glucose says glucose comes into a muscle and immediately gets converted into atp through the very efficient pathway of glucose being converted to pyruvate pyruvate being converted to acetyl coa and that going into the mitochondria where atp is generated under something called oxidative phosphorylation that's called the krebs cycle people may remember that from high school biology and that's the most efficient way to generate atp out of glucose i don't even remember i think each six carbon ring glucose will yield about a net of 34 atps going in that pathway the second potential fate of glucose is to undergo glycolysis which is you take the glucose down to pyruvate but instead of taking the pyruvate towards the mitochondria and going through the krebs cycle you turn it into lactate which yields much less atp and that lactate gets recycled and there's a whole bunch of other stuff there so that would be the second fate and then the third fate of glucose in muscle is it can be stored as glycogen and i'll just pause for a moment to explain what glycogen is glycogen is literally a lattice of glucose so glucose is a single six carbon ring but you can join these things in rows and rows and rows and rows and sheets and sheets and sheets covalently and that becomes a matrix of glucose which is a very efficient way to store it so again there are three things that the muscle can do with glucose we know at least one of them is not working the question is which