Q3 - Consumption of sugar affects the level of unmetabolized

[pobs]

I didn't understand how C was the right answer- How does the secretion of insulin affect the level of unmetabolized blood in the body? Wouldn't the absence of insulin result in a higher than average level of sugar in the blood?

[christine.defenbaugh]

Thanks for posting, pobs!

You are absolutely correct that the absence of insulin would result in a higher than average level of sugar in the blood!

I can't be sure, but I wonder if you were thrown off by the word "secrete" - sometimes this word is misunderstood to mean 'get rid of'. If you thought (C) was suggesting that consuming large amounts of sugar would cause the body to 'get rid of' tons of insulin, this answer would seem to deepen the mystery, just like (D) does.

But that's not what secrete actually means - when the body secretes insulin, that means that it produces insulin, and gets it into circulation in the body to do its job.

So, if consuming tons of sugar then causes the body to produce tons of insulin, and insulin metabolizes that sugar into oblivion - that totally explains how those people end up with generally low amounts of unmetabolized sugar in the blood!

Let's take a quick look at the wrong answers here:

(A) What does being overweight have to do with anything? Do those people eat large amounts of sugar or not? And if they do, WHY do they have low blood sugar? This doesn't help.
So, a bunch of different foods all have a lot of sugar - so what? Why do some people have low blood sugar, even after eating those foods?
(D) This would mean that consuming large amounts of sugar should result in even MORE sugar in the blood, not less. This deepens the mystery!
(E) Well, this explains why there's sugar in the blood in the first place, but not why the people who consume large amounts have low blood sugar.

I hope this helps clear things up a bit!