What is Glycogen? – Dr. Berg

Get access to my FREE resources 👉 https://drbrg.co/4cnUyiU

alright guys so I wanted to do a quick video on something called glycogen because there’s some confusion with because it sounds like glucose and glucagon and all these other similar terms okay so we have glycogen is basically the storage of sugar it’s the storage of glucose so we have glucose molecules all strung together connected collectively is called glycogen okay now to store glycogen you need potassium and this is why if someone’s on a low potassium diet they don’t store glycogen as well so what happens when you actually consume carbs your body increases insulin and then it starts storing glycogen as a first thing that it does and then at a certain point anything extra it starts to route it to fat okay so it converts carbs into fat because we really only have a small amount of storage of glycogen about 1,700 calories roughly about a day supply and then we run out and then our body is supposed to tap into fat so then the question is what is normal blood Sugar’s and what is too much and when do you start to go from storing glycogen to storing fat well normal blood Sugar’s is about 80 so that basically means out of all of your blood about a gallon and a third it’s only really one teaspoon of sugar okay it’s very very small amounts and you can get that sugar from the conversion of fat into sugar or protein in the sugar so we don’t need sugar to actually make glycogen your body can make it also just FYI stress like cortisol the hormone cortisol activated by stress will also increase the storage of glucose so in the liver it’ll just start making more sugar out of protein and make more glucose if you need some okay and especially during a stress State now out of this total amount of glycogen the muscle pretty much holds about 75% of the glycogen and the brain does not have a glycogen reserve it doesn’t store sugar it gets its fuel from the blood so whatever happening in the blood if there’s low blood sugar or high sugar it’ll pull from that but the point is that the body doesn’t store it okay it gets it from other places but the brain loves to run on ketones now in a little bit of sugar but again that sugar could be made from other things it doesn’t have to come from sugar but it loves ketones same thing with the heart the heart loves ketones as a fuel better than glucose and it also loves fatty acids so it can run on a few things and it doesn’t have to run on glucose there’s just a couple parts of body that do need some glucose but again your body can make it through something called gluconeogenesis the formation of new sugar and when we run our body on glucose exclusively because you’re on a high carbohydrate diet we give them the trouble because number one we get the conversion into fat and then we create insulin resistance and that creates more insulin so we have a lot of problems but this video is mainly just to educate you on exactly what glycogen is and how it can be created in the body all right thanks for watching so we’ve been getting a lot of success stories but I don’t have your success story yet so click the link down below and upload you before and after I want to actually hear about your success story I want to see your before-and-afters and every week we do featured success stories so click the link down below and share your success