An Inverse Relation between the Liver Glycogen and the Blood Glucose in the Rat adapted to a Fat Diet

Abstract

THE discovery by Claude Bernard¹ of the role of the liver glycogen in maintaining the blood sugar is well known. The liver was observed by Soskin et al. ² to remove glucose from the blood when there was hyperglycæmia and to add it to the blood during hypoglycæmia. Later, the rate of uptake or output of glucose was shown to be directly proportional to the degree of the hyper- or hypo-glycæmia³. Recently an enzymic mass-action mechanism dependent on the effective intracellular concentration of hepatic glucose-6-phosphate has been put forward⁴ to explain this regulation (the liver cells being freely permeable to glucose). However, while this mechanism may operate in animals adapted to the metabolism of glucose as the primary fuel, experiments in this laboratory have shown that in the rat adapted to a fat diet, the relationship between the liver glycogen and the blood glucose as outlined above is no longer evident.