Disposition of a glucose load in fed rats and rats adapted to a high-carbohydrate diet

Current evidence suggests that, during the transition from the fasted to the fed state, liver glycogen is synthesized primarily from gluconeogenic precursors rather than from glucose unless the circulating glucose concentration is high. In the fed state the glucose concentration already is elevated. We aimed to determine whether administration of an additional oral glucose load (4 g/kg) to chow- or high-carbohydrate diet-adapted (CHO) rats would further increase the glucose concentration and result in increased direct glucose uptake. In the chow- and CHO-fed rats, 70 and 98% of the administered glucose was absorbed by 120 min. In the chow-fed rats the glucose concentration entering the liver increased by only 1.0 mM from 8.0 to 9.0 mM; no net hepatic glucose uptake was observed. In the CHO-adapted rats the entering glucose concentration increased transiently by 3.5 mM from 8.0 to 11.5 mM. This was associated with net glucose uptake, which continued until the entering glucose concentration fell below 9.5 mM, the entering glucose concentration threshold above which net glucose uptake was observed previously in fasted rats. Net hepatic glucose uptake could not be correlated with insulin or hepatic intracellular glucose concentrations. Net glycogen synthesis did not occur in either group. We could not account for the absorbed glucose by the rise in portal glucose concentrations or by increased muscle glycogen deposition. The fate of much of the absorbed glucose remains unknown.