This Is How Your Body Turns Food Into Energy

Your body needs energy to do, well, everything. But where does that energy come from? In this episode, Patrick dives into how exactly mitochondria power the cell, how ATP works, and, alas, the Krebs cycle. Buckle up!

While we need energy to help us move our bodies and do everyday work, our cells also need energy to move their little bodies, manufacture new proteins, and make chemical reactions happen.

Our bodies have a few ways of turning reactants into products—namely extracting energy-rich molecules from the food we eat and turning it into energy.

Enter: a molecule called adenosine triphosphate, or ATP. While, like you might have guessed, adenosine triphosphate has three phosphates, it’s actually the bonds between them that we’re more interested in.

And that is because the chemical bonds that hold those phosphates together hold a lot of energy. When one of those phosphates is broken off, that ATP becomes ADP, or adenosine diphosphate plus one loner phosphate.

That transformation of ATP to ADP results in usable energy that our cells can use to power our biological processes.

So that begs the question — where does ATP come from and how exactly do we turn our food into usable energy? Find out more in this Human.