Photosynthesis for plants is a little bit like if, as a human, you could just lay in the sun on a nice afternoon and create, directly in your stomach, a creamy lentil soup or a sandwich of your choice.
Hello everyone and welcome to The Unseen Threads! I’m Saikat, a normal guy obsessed with helping you understand science and make you fall in love with it. Today, I am going to discuss how these little plants 🪴🌱 are made, where they come from, and why you should absolutely care because it has everything to do with carbs. So, let’s get started.
The Unsung Heroes: Plants and Their Ancestors
Plants do not get enough credit. If this little, tiny, cute plant on my desk could talk… it would tell us the story of its ancestors. After all, its ancestors invented the most important biological process on Earth: photosynthesis. Let me explain.
It was once assumed that plants made themselves out of soil, out of the dirt in the ground. Well, in the 1600s, a scientist by the name of Jean Baptiste Van Helmont set out to understand whether that was the case or not. Here’s what he did: he performed a five-year-long test known as the Willow Experiment, from which humans learned two things: one, that plants are not made out of soil, and two, that Van Helmont was very, very patient.
The Willow Experiment
So, here’s how it went down. Van Helmont planted a baby willow tree in a massive pot filled with 200 pounds of soil. For the next five years, he just grabbed some popcorn, sat back in his chair, and watched the tree grow. After those five years, Van Helmont took the tree out of the soil and weighed it. The tree now weighed 169 pounds—164 pounds more than the baby willow tree that he had planted five years ago. But here’s where it gets really interesting: the amount of soil in the pot had not changed. There was still 200 pounds of soil in that pot.
With this experiment, Van Helmont realized that the matter composing the tree could not have come from the soil because the soil was still there, and the tree was now 164 pounds heavier than it was. So, how do plants make their plant stuff if it isn’t from the soil? Plants invented an incredible solution. They transform not the soil but the air around them into their matter.
Photosynthesis: The Plant’s Superpower
Plants take carbon out of the air and combine it with water to form a molecule that they then use to create every single part of themselves. To do this, they use energy from the sun. They take the carbon from the air, water, and sunlight energy to create the molecule we now call glucose.
For hundreds of years after the Willow Experiment, scientists across the world tried to figure out this process of photosynthesis. The three men who finally cracked the code won the Nobel Prize for their discovery. Their names were Melvin Calvin, Andrew Benson, and James Basham. The process was originally not called photosynthesis; they named it the Calvin-Benson-Basham cycle. Now, we call it photosynthesis.
Why Should You Care About Photosynthesis?
Thank you so much, guys, and I’m personally quite envious of the way that plants create themselves. Out of this glucose, they not only create their structural matter but also generate all their energy without even going to the grocery store. Photosynthesis for plants is a little bit like if, as a human, you could just lay in the sun on a nice afternoon and create directly in your stomach a creamy lentil soup or a sandwich of your choice.
Plants do something truly amazing with this process. Once created, plants can either burn glucose for energy or keep it intact and build themselves out of it. And listen, you could not dream of a better building block. Glucose is so tiny and nimble that you could fit 500,000 molecules of it in the period at the end of a sentence.
The Versatility of Glucose
So, what do plants transform glucose into? Three main important things:
- Starch: Plants can attach glucose molecules to each other and store them for later use. This is called starch. Plants create starch by assembling glucose molecules together in long chains and store this starch in their roots or seeds. For example, root vegetables like potatoes or carrots are full of starch because the plants have stored lots of it there.
- Fiber: Plants can transform glucose into fiber, a wonderful substance that gives plants their ability to stand up. Without fiber, plants would just collapse into a liquid.
- Fructose: Plants can transform glucose into a substance called fructose, which is very sweet. Plants store fructose in their fruit to condense energy and make the fruits irresistible to animals, who then transport the seeds of the plants far and wide.
The Glucose Connection to Human Life
This glucose-burning system was invented by plants and then used by every single living thing—from dinosaurs back in the day to dolphins and us humans. Yes, we run on glucose. Every cell in our body uses glucose to provide energy to their system. But you might be wondering, how do we get glucose since humans don’t photosynthesize things out of thin air?
The main way we give glucose to our bodies is by eating plants. When we eat these plants, we’re consuming starch, fiber, fructose, and glucose. These molecules form the family we now refer to as carbohydrates. We call them carbohydrates because they come from carbon in the air and hydro (water). Carbohydrates are the marriage of carbon and water.
Eating for Glucose: Understanding Carbohydrates
When we eat carbs, they turn back into glucose as we digest them, providing the glucose that we need. So, when we eat a carrot or a potato, we’re eating starch. That starch breaks down in our body and releases individual glucose molecules that our body can use for energy.
One element we don’t often refer to as a carbohydrate in our modern language is fiber. Even though scientifically, fiber is part of the carbohydrate family, it doesn’t turn back into glucose. We generally don’t call fiber a carb, but scientifically, it is a carb. However, when I talk about carbs, I’m referring to things that contain starch or sugar, like fructose.
The Modern Dilemma: Too Much Glucose
Our body is wired to seek out glucose for energy, so it’s no wonder we love eating carbs. There’s a deep biological ancestral programming that tells us to seek out foods that will give our body glucose. But here’s the thing: the food environment we live in today is nothing like the way nature intended us to consume glucose. A candy bar is not the same as an ancestral apple. A candy bar gives way too much glucose too quickly to our body, and too much of a good thing hurts us. Too much glucose today is the cause of type 2 diabetes, creates cravings, fatigue, inflammation, premature aging, mental health issues, and a long list of other conditions.
Navigating the Modern Food Landscape
It’s not our fault that we need to navigate this complex food landscape. Food companies create products that are as addictive and palatable as possible so that we keep coming back for more and buying more of their products. So, what do we do? We can’t fight this evolutionary programming, this love for carbs. We learn how to eat some of these carbs we love with less impact on our body. This is where my glucose hacks come in.
I’ve synthesized from all the latest scientific research 10 super easy principles that will teach you how you can eat the candy bar, the pasta, the bread, and the cookies with less impact on your body. If you use the hacks, you will be able to give your body a steady, healthy amount of glucose it needs for energy without going overboard and causing damage.
Glucose Hacks for Healthier Eating
Some of my favorite hacks include:
- Savory Breakfast: Instead of a sweet one.
- Clothing Your Carbs: Add some protein, fat, or fiber to the carbs you eat. This repackages carbs into a more natural form, as in nature, wherever there were carbs, there was also fiber. Fiber slows down how quickly we absorb carbs and the glucose spike they might create.
- Move After Eating Carbs: Give your body and muscles the opportunity to soak up some of the glucose you just ate instead of it hanging around and creating a big, damaging glucose spike.
There are lots more hacks where those came from. Click the link in the description to get the one-pager with all 10 hacks.
That’s all we have time for today. I hope you enjoyed this little biology lesson. Thank you for being here, and I’ll see you next time!
