BIOC 2580 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Thiolase, Carnitine, Adenosine
1 Oct 2015
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You can see from the numbers on your left that fat is the most concentrated store of metabolic energy. That"s why the first nations peoples made pemmican: mixing a bit of meat (protein source) with lots of fat made a foodstuff that you could carry on a long journey and that would sustain you for a long time. It"s also how birds store enough energy to complete long migrations with little food. Two reasons: it is chemically very reduced - most of the carbon atoms are ch2. Sugars or proteins usually remain somewhat hydrated, even when you try to desiccate them, and water is just dead weight, as far as energy storage goes. Nature has given us a series of energy reservoirs. As we burn through them (say, during a period of fasting) we move from readily-available but limited capacity reservoirs to much larger stores of energy that, however, are more difficult to mobilize.
