Wicklow - prenatal metabolism

Metabolism as a general term looks at glucose, fats, amino acids and how your body utilizes these three basic components for fuel.  So, in order to keep our heart beating and our nervous system working and our muscles firing, we need to burn some sort of fuel.  Preferentially we burn glucose as fuel. It’s the most easily available and that’s why preferentially it gets shunted towards the fetus for fetal development.  Once we don’t have glucose to use as readily available fuel, we’ll start to burn lipids and then when we’re done burning fats we’ll start to burn proteins.  So that’s the progression of metabolism in terms of fuel utilization.  But the most readily available will be glucose and that’s what the fetus will use for growth and development in utero.