World 2-2
A Teaspoon of Sugar
A Bit of Sugar Goes a Long Way
I never say maths is fun. But it can be useful for riddles.
Like, how long would it take to walk around the world (if there were a bridge all the way around)?
To give a rough idea, 40,000 kilometres divided by (let’s say) 40 kilometres per day of walking = 1,000 days. If only there were a bridge around the world, so I could walk it (in under 3 years)!
Talking t1d now, I wondered:
How much glucose is there in ALL my blood?
Do the Glucose Math
‘Normal’ BGL is about 100 mg/dL.
Though that might look tricky, I can break it down further.
mg = milligram. Milli is a fancy word for ‘1 thousandth’. It’s a very little amount.
Getting 100 of those very little things gives one-tenth of a gram (0.1 grams).
Milk the Math Cow
dL looks fancy to begin with, but it’s also simple.
dL or Deci-litre is just one of those fancy Latin words for ‘1 tenth’ (centi means 1 hundredth, as in centi-metre).
So 10 decilitres = 1 litre. 1 litre is about a carton of milk usually.
Putting it all Together
If every deci-litre has 100 milli-grams,
then 60 dL (big person) has 60 times that, or 6000 milligrams,
which is only about 1 teaspoon of sugar in ALL the blood of an adult.
(Only 1/2 a teaspoon in a child.)
I feel terrible if my BGL drops to 70mg/dL, which is only a little bit less sugar.
I feel tired if my BGL rises to 200mg/dL, which is only doubling a very small amount of sugar.
A small amount – but it makes a BIG difference.
P.S. What about mmol/L?
It helps if you know a bit of chemistry for this.
mmol is ‘milli-molar’. We already know ‘milli’ but a ‘mole’ is a weirder thing to do with numbers of atoms (it has nothing to do with the animal called a mole).
1 ‘mole’ of glucose weighs 180 grams. 1 thousandth of that (1 milli-molar) is 180/1000 grams, or 0.18 grams.
Taking a ‘normal’ BGL of about 5.5 mmol/L, I get the following maths:
5.5 times 0.18 grams = 1 gram of glucose in every 1 litre of blood.
I have about 6 litres of blood, so 6 times 1 gram = 6 grams, which is about 1 teaspoon.