Dr. Ben Bikman

but it's overwhelming its ability to undergo glycolysis.

And if most cells, there's so much glycolysis happening and it starts to inhibit entry into the glycolytic pathway.

Then you divert the glucose into the sorbitol pathway.

Now you have glucose turning into sorbitol, which the cell can't do anything with.

And so sorbitol begins to accumulate in the cell, and that starts to increase the osmotic gradient into the cell.

And now you have basically a water balloon that's getting overfilled, and you can have overfull, and you have this what's called hydropic degeneration, where you basically force water into the cell because of this...

glucose metabolite, and then the cell can burst.

And this is a large part of the problem with like macular degeneration and retinopathies and the nephropathies of the kidney.

The main mechanism whereby the glucose is damaging or one of the main mechanisms is the conversion of the glucose into sorbitol.

And when sorbitol accumulates in the cell, it can't go anywhere and it starts pulling in water and the cell will burst.

Yeah.

So what's funny though, when I teach this concept to my students, you can tell I'm an ultimate professor here.

I teach all these ideas.

I actually have my students as a funny little assignment look up the customer reviews of sugar-free gummy bears.

And it's so funny because these derivatives of glucose, like sorbitol or mannitol, they can't move across cell membranes.

And so wherever they are in the body, they're doomed to stay there, including if it just comes into the intestines.

So part of the humor for these 18, 19-year-olds is finding these people giving customer reviews of how the gastrointestinal distress of these sweetened gummy bears that are like sorbitol

That all stays in the guts and it pulls a lot of water in the guts anyway, creating some socially awkward situations for these poor people, to put it politely.

Yeah, a humble little peptide.

Yeah, I mean, in most people, it's one thing for like a steroid hormone to have a kind of global effect, but peptide hormones don't often do that.