Introduction:
Coming up on this episode of The Doctor’s Farmacy.
Jessie Inchauspe:
90% of us are walking around with these glucose spikes happening in our body without knowing it, yet we’re very familiar with the consequences, the cravings, the fatigue, the mood swings, the weight gain.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Welcome to The Doctor’s Farmacy, I’m Dr. Mark Hyman, that’s farmacy with an F, a place for conversations that matter. And if you’ve ever struggled with your blood sugar, or maybe you just are moody, irritable and hangry sometimes, or maybe you’re gaining weight and you don’t know why, this is the podcast for you, because we’re going to be talking with someone who’s delved deep into the world of blood sugar in ways that have only been possible in the last few years, with the advent of something called continuous glucose monitoring, which is a very cool technology that allows you to measure your blood sugar in real time and see how you, not somebody else, how you respond to particular foods and what that can teach you about your health, your biology, and even your brain function.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
So I have the great pleasure to having Jessie Inchauspe, who is a layperson but has learned more about blood sugar than probably almost anybody else on the planet through her own body, who’s on a mission to translate cutting edge science into easy tips to help people improve their physical and their mental health.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
She’s the founder of the wildly popular Instagram account GlucoseGoddess, where she teaches life changing food habits to hundreds of thousands of people and she holds a bachelor’s degree in science from King’s College in London, a master of science degree in biochemistry from Georgetown University. And she’s done all sorts of work in genetic startups in Silicon Valley. And she herself had her own struggle with her blood sugar, which she didn’t actually realize was causing a whole bunch of symptoms, including mental health issues, which most people don’t think about. In her new book, her first book, The Glucose Revolution, Jessie is sharing her startling discoveries about the essential role of blood sugar in every aspect of her life from cravings to fertility, and the surprising hacks to optimize it while still eating the food that we love. I always say you want to eat food that we love and that loves us back. So welcome, Jessie.
Jessie Inchauspe:
Thank you, Mark. Thank you for having me.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Of course. So listen, we were chatting a little earlier and you were sharing how you got into this because, what is a math and biochemistry major actually doing writing a book about health, and you came into this through your own doorway of mental health issues. So take us through your journey. What was going on for you? How did you figure out that it was blood sugar that was a problem, and what you learned from that?
Jessie Inchauspe:
So I was a happy and naive 19-year-old thinking I was invincible, and then a freak accident happened. I was in Hawaii on the island of Maui and I jumped off a waterfall thinking it would be a fantastic idea, turns out it wasn’t, and one of my vertebrae exploded just by hitting the water.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Ooh.
Jessie Inchauspe:
Yes, yes. It was intense. So I had a very difficult surgery and then physical symptoms. I mean, I was in a lot of pain, but then what really stayed with me was mental health struggles. I started having this thing called de-personalization, which is kind of a cousin of disassociation, and at the tender age of 19, Mark, I just had one goal. It was to wake up in the morning feeling good because I felt completely broken. I had no idea what was happening. I felt lost. I felt alone.
Jessie Inchauspe:
I didn’t understand the signals my body was sending me. So I started a journey to try to figure out how to understand and communicate with my body. And that’s actually why I went to grad school and did biochemistry first because I wanted to understand the inner workings of the body system. And then I moved to Silicon Valley, worked in the field of genetics. Genetics didn’t really offer any answers to me because your genetics, they can help you understand what diseases you might have a slightly higher risk of getting, but they don’t tell you what to do to wake up tomorrow feeling good.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
No.
Jessie Inchauspe:
No, but while I was there, serendipitously, we had this internal research pilot at the company and they offered five employees to try out a continuous glucose monitor, which is the device that had been usually reserved for diabetics that you wear on the back of your arms, and that measure your glucose levels continuously. And I had a hunch this would be a fantastic idea. So I volunteered, and I put the device on and then all of a sudden, I could see the inside of my body on my phone. And it was really light bulb moment for me, like in the cartoons when the light bulb turns on above the head. Mark, I could finally speak to my body. I would do something and get a response. I would drink a cappuccino, sometimes there would be a glucose spike, sometimes there wouldn’t be.
Jessie Inchauspe:
I would eat something, spike, eat something else, no spike. And then what changed the game is when I realized that glucose spikes could trigger these episodes of depersonalization in me. So one day I was just going about my business and I felt this sort of wave of stress, anxiety, and sort of leaving my body, come over me. And I checked my glucose levels. And what I saw was the biggest spike I had ever seen because I had just eaten a donut on an empty stomach for breakfast.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
How high did it go?
Jessie Inchauspe:
It went to 185.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
What? That’s really high, guys, for everybody listening. It should never go over 120.
Jessie Inchauspe:
Yeah. It’s really, really high. And I was just in the throes of understanding what glucose was, what I should be doing, but that cemented it for me. I was like, okay, this is the solution. This is the key. This is the root cause that I need to address. And so I learned, Mark, how to flatten my glucose curves. And as a scientist, I delved into all the research. I read all the papers. I had like a million tabs open on my computer. And I discovered all these incredible hacks that I could put in place in my life, very easy, simple solutions, like eating my food in the right order, incorporating vinegar, having a savory breakfast, et cetera, that allowed me to stabilize my glucose groups. And as I did this, I healed myself. And not only did I heal the mental health stuff, I also healed things that I didn’t even know were a problem.
Jessie Inchauspe:
All of a sudden, I wasn’t tired at 3:00 PM or I didn’t even crave donuts anymore. I realized that my body was functioning much, much better this way. So I started sharing it with my friends, my family, they got better. And then they asked me to put it online so they could share it with more people. And I started the Instagram account and then it grew far beyond anything I had ever imagined because I realized 90% of us are walking around with these glucose spikes happening in our body without knowing it. Yet we’re very familiar with the consequences, the cravings, the fatigue, the mood swings, the weight gain, and optimizing our glucose levels allows us to reverse all those symptoms.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Absolutely. It’s so important, and your book is so important because it teaches us really how to reimagine our relationship to our own bodies and actually democratize health information, putting you at the center of your healthcare, not the healthcare system or your doctor, and it empowers you with real data in real time, to adjust your behavior to optimize your health, which is revolutionary. This is what we call the whole quantified self movement that’s now emerging, whether it’s your Aura Ring, or your Eight Sleep mat, or your Apple watch or Whoop or Fitbit.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
I mean, these are all technologies that are coming and there’s going to be more, you’re going to be able to soon plant a sensor in your blood that won’t just measure your blood sugar, but maybe 1000 different metabolites. And we’ll be able to get AI helping us sort through it all and make sense of what to do and tell us what to do and what not to do and what to eat, to sleep better, feel better, make more muscle. I mean, it’s going to be quite amazing. And this is just the beginning of this absolute revolution in healthcare.
Jessie Inchauspe:
Absolutely.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
So I want to have you break down, you mentioned a few things, but I really would like to have you break down what the symptoms are that most people are unaware of that are related to swings in blood sugar, because it’s not just high or low. It’s these excursions up and down that often cause the most havoc. So kind of walk us through, you’re the average person, you’re kind of walking around not knowing what the hell’s going on in your body, and what kind of things might you experience if your blood sugar is out of whack?
Jessie Inchauspe:
Absolutely. So the average person walks around and they feel all these symptoms. So they might feel really hungry even though they just ate 90 minutes ago, or it might be four in the afternoon and they walk by a bakery and they’re like, oh my God, I need to eat three cookies right now-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Right now.
Jessie Inchauspe:
Or they might feel really tired… Right now. Or they might feel really tired at 11:00 AM. And these are symptoms that often we tend to attribute to like lack of willpower. And then there are the more long term symptoms like acne starts developing on your face, you might get hormonal imbalances that lead to things like polycystic ovarian syndrome, worsening menopause symptoms, long term Type 2 diabetes. And all of these things we tend to medicate, right? We’re like symptom, medication, boom, but actually these symptoms are your body telling you, hey, hello, there’s actually glucose spikes happening in here. There’s something you can change and heal from within. So in my community, the most common symptoms as I mentioned are fatigue, waking up, not feeling rested, feeling like you need to eat every 90 minutes. You need to snack constantly, and feeling this pull towards sweet foods. And then just having a very unsteady energy and feeling tired after meals, feeling tired throughout the day, needing coffee to keep going.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah. I mean, those are really the common ones, but there’s others. I remember a guy who came to see me who was having incredible panic attacks. I said, well, tell me about your panic attacks and your anxiety. And of course, in medicine we typically attribute these to psychological causes and we prescribe anxiety medication, like Ativan or Valium. And I said, well, tell me what’s going on, when do you get it? What happens? And go into the details of the story.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
And it turned out, he basically had this big belly and was severely insulin resistant and he ate a very high starch sugar diet. And he would have tons of carbs for breakfast, which is basically the American breakfast, is sugar for breakfast. I think we should call it dessert, not breakfast, for what most people are eating, muffins, bagels, cereal, which is 75% sugar, pancakes, waffles, French toast, muffins, it’s kind of a sugar Lollapalooza. And he said, “Every afternoon, I just get overwhelming panic attacks. I start sweating. My heart’s palpitating. I feel like I’m going to die. I can’t breathe. The world’s closing in on me.” And I said, “And what do you do?” He says, “Well, I drink a can of Coke and I feel better.”
Jessie Inchauspe:
So he was on a rollercoaster, a glucose rollercoaster.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
It was sugars were up and down, and I’m like, you are hypoglycemic. So even though your sugars can go high, they can go low. And then what happens is there is [crosstalk 00:11:33].
Jessie Inchauspe:
And for me it was mental health as well.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah. And it creates all these mental health issues, depression, anxiety, palpitations, panic attacks. And then you mentioned a bunch of things that people aren’t even aware of, like infertility or acne. I mean, most people don’t think about that.
Jessie Inchauspe:
Wrinkles.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Of course, diabetes… Wrinkles, right, wrinkles.
Jessie Inchauspe:
Aging.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Aging, dementia. Heart disease, cancer.
Jessie Inchauspe:
Fatty liver disease.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Fatty liver, every pretty much age related disease, in fact, aging itself is often related to sugar issues and to lack of insulin sensitivity, which is what happens when you make a diet that is full of starch and sugar, you get these wild spikes in sugar, but then that causes a spike in insulin and then sugar crashes. Then you need more and more insulin just to keep the sugar balance. And ultimately that causes a whole cascade of problems that we now know as the fundamental drivers of aging.
Jessie Inchauspe:
Yes. And on the topic of aging, one thing that really startled me that I discovered is that every time your glucose level spike, all the glucose that’s rushing into your system, it’s going to bump into other molecules and it’s going to do this thing called glycation to the other molecules. And when a molecule is glycated, it’s damaged, and glycation leads to us literally cooking from the inside, like a piece of toast in the toaster. That’s what happens. And then when we’re fully cooked, we die. That’s why we die. And so the more glucose spikes in your diet, the faster you age internally, but also externally because it leads to wrinkles. It’s mind blowing, it really is.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah, it’s true. I remember I was at this longevity conference that Menla Institute, which is Menla Center, which is by Robert Thurman, who’s a Buddhist scholar and he had the Dalai Lama there, and all these Tibetan scholars, but also Nobel prize winners and scientists about longevity. And there was [inaudible 00:13:25] there from MIT, who discovered sirtuins and the role of life extension by activating sirtuins with resveratrol and other compounds. And I said, these master regulators like of aging, how do they get regulated? What screws them up? How does it work? He says, it’s sugar. Sugar is the biggest problem that we have in terms of not allowing these longevity switches to work properly. And so we literally turn off the longevity switch. We should have rapidly accelerate aging when we over consume sugar, and I would say starch as well. I mean, that’s just the same as sugar because you can eat a bagel or sugar, it’s the same thing.
Jessie Inchauspe:
Yeah. And so we end up in this situation where we know it’s bad for us and we know we need to avoid glucose spikes, but often people can be a bit lost as to where to begin. Does it mean I should never eat starch and sugar again? That feels very draconian for most people. And so what I’ve developed are these 10 principles, these food principles that allow you to keep your glucose levels steady without giving up all the foods you love. Because personally, Mark, I need a chocolate cake for my birthday. I’m not going to have a brussel sprout, low carb, no sugar cake. I need chocolate cake, this is a non negotiable part-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Or carrot cake, maybe carrot cake.
Jessie Inchauspe:
You’re a better human than I am. But I love sugar. And so when I first discovered the world of glucose, my fasting glucose levels was 95. I was 23 years old and that was high. And through my hacks I’ve lowered it to 79 without giving up all the stuff I love-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Well, tell us, what do we do? I mean, all of us are flooded in a sea of sugar and flour. I mean the average person in America eats 152 pounds of sugar and 133 pounds of flour a year, that’s about a pound a day per person, per year, of sugar and flour, which is insane. How do we deal with it? What are the hacks that you found that helped regulate your blood sugar? And then we’ll get into some of the surprising things you learned by having this continuous glucose monitor, which is by the way, available to everybody right now in a new company called Levels, which I’m an advisor and an investor in, just transparently, they’re actually kind of innovating in this space to help empower people with this information.
Jessie Inchauspe:
Absolutely. And anybody using a continuous glucose monitor, try my hacks and you will see the difference in your glucose levels, and anybody who cannot afford a glucose monitor yet, my hacks work, even if you don’t have a monitor, that’s what’s cool. So number one hack that is incredibly easy that has fantastic evidence supporting it is, eat your food in the right order. So yes, so anybody listening, if you’re about to have a meal, look in front of you, let’s say you have some chicken, some broccoli and some potatoes. If you eat the elements of this meal in a particular order, you can reduce the glucose spike of the meal by 75%. This means less aging, less inflammation, less weight gain, fewer cravings, et cetera.
Jessie Inchauspe:
The right order is, vegetables first, protein and fats second, and starches and sugars last. And so when we do this, when we eat our vegetables first during a meal, the fiber in the vegetables lands in our stomach, then in our upper intestine, coats the walls of our intestine with this viscous mesh, and then any starch or sugars you eat afterwards will be absorbed to a lesser extent in your blood stream, therefore smaller glucose spike, but you’re eating the exact same thing. And this is so cool and so many people send me messages, like, I just simply changed the order in which I ate my food. I didn’t change what I ate, and things started changing for me. That’s the number one really cool hack.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
So it’s interesting, I often recommend people take something called PGX or polyglycoplex, which is a derivative of cognac root, cognac is a Japanese tuber, like a root vegetable that is made into noodles. It’s actually used a lot in Japanese cooking and is very viscus and it absorbs 50 times its weight in water. So if you take some of this powder beforehand, or even the capsules, it basically acts like a sponge, absorbs all the water and slows the absorption of everything so your glucose doesn’t spike.
Jessie Inchauspe:
Very cool. I mean, this is really super powerful. Another one that people love is vinegar. I don’t know if you know about this, Mark. It’s like-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Tell us.
Jessie Inchauspe:
It’s incredible. So the hack is, before your meals take a tall glass of water, like the one I’m holding now. So this is about twice the size of a regular glass, and pour into it one tablespoon of vinegar. It can be any type of vinegar. My favorite is apple cider vinegar, but white wine vinegar, rice vinegar also work, and drink it up to 30 minutes before your meal. And in the studies, the scientists say that the effect of vinegar is almost the same as the effect of medication given to diabetics to reduce glucose spikes-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Why does it work?
Jessie Inchauspe:
By just doing this… Because there’s a molecule in vinegar called acetic acid and acetic acid does two really cool things. One-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
That’s actually what vinegar is, it’s acetic acid, right?
Jessie Inchauspe:
Absolutely. There’s also water in vinegar, right? So that’s one of the molecules in vinegars is acetic acid. So it goes into your stomach and it talks to this enzyme, called alpha-amylase, and alpha-amylase’s job is to break down starch into glucose. And it tells that enzyme, hey girlie, please slow down your role, slow your role. And so that enzyme works slower. So the breakdown of starches into glucose happens slower. That’s number one. So slower delivery of glucose into your bloodstream later on. Number two-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
So you take the vinegar, you take it like a spoonful before?
Jessie Inchauspe:
You should dilute it in water just to be safe. Yeah. So a spoonful… In the studies you can do one tablespoon. You can do two tablespoons. Personally, one tablespoon is what I use because it’s just, two tablespoons starts being a lot of vinegar in your glass of water. One tablespoon is what I like. And the second thing it does, which is incredible, is that it goes to your muscles and it says, hey muscles, as soon as glucose gets into the bloodstream, soak it up, store it as glycogen in the muscles, don’t let it float around. And so by these two mechanisms, glucose is broken down at a slower rate in your stomach. And as soon as it arrives in the bloodstream, it gets soaked up. As a result, glucose spike reduced by up to 30%. And this matters because then you don’t have the glucose crash. You don’t have the cravings, you don’t start that cravings rollercoaster that so many of us are on, yet you’re eating the exact same food as before.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Amazing. And that’s two hacks. So we’ve got the timing of what you eat when, vegetables, protein and starch. And then the vinegar before you eat, what else?
Jessie Inchauspe:
So if anybody is still having a sweet breakfast, this is a very important hack. Have a-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Of course, nobody listening to this podcast ever eats a sweet breakfast because they’ve been listening to this podcast and they know that we should not have dessert for breakfast, but just in case you haven’t heard many of the podcasts, listen up-
Jessie Inchauspe:
Just in case this is the first podcast you listen to have a savory breakfast. So in the studies what they’ve done, is they’ve taken two groups of people and they’ve given them two breakfasts, one of two breakfast, same number of calories. We know calories don’t count, but still it’s important to mention this. One group had a breakfast that spiked their glucose levels. The other group had a breakfast that kept their glucose levels steady. What happened was, in the group that had the spiky breakfast, they got hungry again after two hours, whereas the group that had the steady glucose breakfast didn’t get hungry for five hours. So-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Of course.
Jessie Inchauspe:
Yeah, of course the curve of your breakfast really determines how you’re going to feel for the rest of the day, and whether you’re going to feel in control and connected to your body or whether walking by that bakery is going to give you an irresistible urge to buy all the cookies, like it used to be for me. I used to have a Nutella crepe for breakfast every morning growing up, Mark. And by 10:30, I was starving. I mean-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Nutella crepe. Yeah, that’ll do it.
Jessie Inchauspe:
But I’m recovered now, I’m recovered. And if I really want a Nutella crepe, what I do is I have it after lunch or dinner as a dessert, and I have some vinegar before. So that’s another hack, if you want something sweet-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
So put vinegar on your cookies, is that the thing-
Jessie Inchauspe:
No, just pour vinegar all over the cookies [crosstalk 00:21:47]. My friends love me when I come to parties. No, so it’s having the vinegar and the water before you eat the sweet thing, having the sweet thing after a meal, and also then using your muscles for 10 minutes. So your muscles are really your biggest ally in reducing your glucose spikes. And so what I recommend, it’s another hack, after your meals use your muscles for 10 minutes. Top favorites include dancing to your three favorite songs really loud in your living room, going for a walk with your dog, doing the dishes, the laundry, whatever. Use your muscles, that way you’ll curve the spike and you’ll feel better.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
That’s a really important point. I think people don’t realize this, but the data is so compelling on what you’re saying, which is, if you just take a walk after dinner for 15, 20 minutes, half an hour, you will see a dramatic change in your metabolism and your blood sugar.
Jessie Inchauspe:
Absolutely. Absolutely. It’s really incredible. And this works particularly well to combat the post meal sleepiness that a lot of us feel if you just use your muscles afterwards, you have all this energy again, because you’re not experiencing such a big crash. And if you can’t go outside and you’re just home and you’re watching, for example, a TV show after dinner or a movie, people can get really creative. So you could hold a plank in front of your couch while you’re watching the movie, you could get some kettlebells and do some bicep curls, whatever works, whatever floats your boats, but that’ll really help your body deal with the glucose coming through.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Amazing. What else, you’ve said 10 things. There’s a lot more.
Jessie Inchauspe:
I know. I’ll give you one more, and then the rest are in my book, Glucose Revolution. One more is putting clothes on your carbs. So what do I mean? Do not let your carbs-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Putting clothes on your carbs?
Jessie Inchauspe:
Don’t let your carbs-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
No naked carbs?
Jessie Inchauspe:
No naked carbs, no naked carbs. So any time you’re eating-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
What’s a naked carb?
Jessie Inchauspe:
Aha. So a naked carb is sugar or starch that you’re eating on its own, naked. You just eat it naked and it lands naked and it creates a big glucose spike. So to put clothes on your cards, what you do is anytime you eat something sweet or something starchy, you make sure to put some protein, fat or fiber on it. You put some clothes on that. So example, I’m going to take the chocolate cake example, I put Greek yogurt on it if I ever want it in the middle of the day. If you want a piece of sourdough bread, put some avocado on it. Put some butter on it. If you ever want to eat some rice, have some eggs with it, some smoked salmon, some greens that you saute.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
That brilliant. I think the idea that we need to not be eating any of this stuff in a way that spikes our blood sugar is key and what we’re learning and what you learned through measuring your blood sugar for years and tracking everything, is how different foods affect you. But the interesting thing is that what might affect you might not affect somebody else, and what affects somebody else might not affect you. So can you talk about the differences in glucose metabolism from person to person depending on their genetics and even their microbiome?
Jessie Inchauspe:
Absolutely. So when I started discovering the world of glucose monitoring, I set a few of my friends up with one as well, and we tested the same foods. So for example, we would eat the same cookie and then compare our glucose spikes. It turns out mine were always bigger than other people’s, and I was like, darn it. I really love cookies. And so I started thinking, what does this mean? Why is my spike so much bigger than my friend, Luna’s spike? What’s going on here? Well, many things could be going on. So as you mentioned, microbiome could be a factor, hydration level, tiredness, how well we had slept the night before, muscle mass, obviously because your muscles soak up glucose, insulin sensitivity. So how metabolically healthy we are, and just many, many more things. The phase of your menstrual cycle, your stress levels.
Jessie Inchauspe:
There’s a lot of stuff going on there. So it was really interesting to notice what choices might be better for my glucose levels compared to other people. But I kept coming back to the fact that the science shows that the hacks work in all of us. So if me and my friend who both ate the cookie, had both put some clothes on the cookie, let’s say 10 almonds, both of our spikes would’ve been proportionately smaller than the naked cookie spike. So you have to keep that in mind, these principles work for all of us, but then if you have the opportunity to use a glucose monitor, you might discover much more personalized and in depth preferences that your body has.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah. You know, Jessie, I remember reading that Israeli study where they looked at the microbiome and how that uniqueness of each of our ecological community that we live in, which is our gut-
Jessie Inchauspe:
That lives in us, yeah.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
How that actually is so determinant of what happens with our metabolism. And we know from animal studies, if you take the poop out of a skinny mouse and you put it in a fat mouse, the fat mouse will get skinny.
Jessie Inchauspe:
Yeah, or in a diabetic to not diabetic.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah. If you take a metabolically healthy person, which there’s not that many of us around anymore, there’s about only 12% of us in America that are metabolically healthy. But if you find a person, good luck, and you transmit their poop into a diabetic, their blood sugar gets better. And I remember a case which I had years ago, I think I might have mentioned on the podcast once, of a gentleman who had Type 2 diabetes, really poorly controlled, sugars were well over 200 all the time. And we got them down to like 150, but we couldn’t just get them all the way normal, even on a ketogenic diet. And one day he called me up and he said, “Dr. Hyman, I’m having a lot of digestive symptoms. I’m bloated, I’m distended. I have all these issues.” And I said, “Okay, well, let’s do some diagnostic work up, a [inaudible 00:27:37], but in the meantime while you’re suffering, just try some charcoal to see if that can absorb some of these sort of bloating and the gas and the toxins, which can cause these symptoms.”
Dr. Mark Hyman:
And he did. And then he called me back and says, “Dr. Hyman, I don’t know what happened, but my blood sugar went to normal. I don’t even understand.” And I did understand because the microbiome plays this huge role in our metabolic health and something called metabolic endotoxemia, which means that the toxins produced by bad bugs in the gut when we eat the wrong things, get absorbed and they cause inflammation, the inflammation causes us to be insulin resistant and that makes us more diabetic. I mean, it’s just a whole cascade, a vicious cycle. And so simply by absorbing the metabolic toxins in his gut from bad bugs, we were able to actually correct his blood sugar. So’s quite fascinating. It’s not as simple as we think, it’s just, oh, just eat this, or don’t eat that or exercise or don’t exercise. It’s kind of a personalized story.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
And I think there are universal principles, like you mentioned, and I just want to loop back on something you said before as well, because you talked about these sort of toast that happens when proteins and sugars in your blood and you become toast and you’re literally toast. I mean, it’s actually true. You’re toasting your system. And there’s a phenomenon that’s called advanced glycation end product. And we measure this when we measure our average blood sugar through hemoglobin A1C, which is just measuring the proteins in hemoglobin, getting glommed onto by sugar and forming this crusty crème brulée like chicken skin, that phenomenon, it’s called the Maillard reaction, happens inside your body, not just when you’re cooking. And that is one of the hallmarks of aging, is the abnormal proteins that form in the body that gum everything up.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
And this happens in your brain, it’s called Type 3 diabetes. It happens in your heart and your organs. It really is the phenomena that leads to rapid aging and death. And then what’s even funnier is that these things are called ages, advanced glycation end products, and they bind to receptors on your cell, called rages. So the ages make you rage literally and turn on all the inflammatory downstream phenomena that we see as inflammaging.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
So it is such an important thing to understand, and regulating your blood sugar is probably the single most important thing you can do. I remember being at [inaudible 00:29:53] years ago, and there was a cardiologist that came from Harvard and he gave a lecture and he said, if you could take a group of 100-year-old people and you could find a group with clean arteries, they’d have one thing in common. What would that be? They’re insulin sensitive, meaning they’re very good at keeping their blood sugar even without a lot of insulin. That’s a key to longevity and healthy aging. And not just that, but all these other conditions that you mentioned from acne, to infertility, to depression, to panic attacks, to fatigue, energy, insomnia. I mean, night sweats are even a common symptom, men get night sweats too, and often it’s because they have these hypoglycemic spikes and they can wake up with soaked sheets. So really important to get your sugar dialed in.
Jessie Inchauspe:
So that’s one of the things that happens when we have a glucose spike, it’s the toasting. And maybe I can mention something else that happens when our glucose levels spike. So every cell on your body needs energy to function. Your brain cells need energy to think, your eye cells to see your toe cells to dance all night long. Every cell in your body is really hungry for energy. And the most easy place thy get this energy is through glucose that we eat. And so as you digest a meal and glucose goes into your bloodstream, it heads to your cells to be converted to energy. And the little organelles that do this work are mitochondria. They take glucose, turn it into ATP, which is energy. And so you might think, okay, well, if I need energy, then the more glucose I eat, the more energy I have, there must be a correlation just like that.
Jessie Inchauspe:
It turns out that’s not the case. If you overwhelm your mitochondria with too much glucose, which is the case when a glucose spike happens, your mitochondria don’t get excited. They actually shut down. They’re like, whoa, whoa, can’t deal with all this stuff. Don’t know what to do. I’m stressing out. I can’t work anymore. Your mitochondria shut down and they get stressed, and they release these things called free radicals into your cells. And free radicals, they harm everything that they touch. So if they touch your DNA, they might harm it and create a mutation that could lead to cancer later on. If they touch a cell membrane, they can break the cell membrane and damage the integrity of the cell. And so your body’s response to these free radicals is inflammation. That’s one of the ways that glucose spikes increase inflammation. The problem is in this case, if it becomes chronic inflammation, it’s not good. And that is another thing that creates a terrain for chronic diseases. I mean, three out of five people are going to die of an inflammation based disease.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
I mean, I don’t know if it’s three, it’s probably 100%-
Jessie Inchauspe:
You think?
Dr. Mark Hyman:
I’m actually sure. I mean, unless you get hit by a truck or fall out of a train or something, I think most of the people die from inflammatory related conditions, because all aging itself leads to more inflammation through a whole series of mechanisms, including your blood sugar, including environmental toxins, including your microbiome, including latent infections, including our processed inflammatory diet, including chronic stress. I mean, all the things that we see around us all the time are all driving this inflammatory process, but sugar is sort of the king, queen and prince of driving inflammation in your body. And so it’s such an important thing. It’s why I’ve been talking about this for decades. Because as a doctor, seeing patients and testing this stuff, when no one else was looking at it, it was like, wow, people are messed up. I would do glucose tolerance test, not on diabetics, but on almost everybody who came in as a screening test for their metabolic health because your blood sugar can be perfectly normal and you can still be a mess, right?
Jessie Inchauspe:
Yeah, absolutely.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
And I think that’s an important lesson. We’ve had Dr. Casey Means talking about this on the podcast, talking about how there’s patients who literally have perfectly normal blood sugars, but their insulins are so high that they’re keeping their blood sugar normal and that causes a whole nother cascade of problem.
Jessie Inchauspe:
Yeah, because I think insulin increases for 10 years before fasting glucose levels increase.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah.
Jessie Inchauspe:
You can really tell [crosstalk 00:33:48].
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah, I mean the last thing that happens is your fasting glucose going up, right?
Jessie Inchauspe:
Yeah.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
And then the second to last thing is your fasting glucose goes up, but then your insulin, I mean your glucose after you eat goes up but that’s again, a late stage phenomena. Earlier stages are high insulin after two hours, then a high insulin fasting. And then it’s like, so we’re getting on the train so late in medicine, we need to think about how to go upstream to get to the cause.
Jessie Inchauspe:
Yeah. For a long time we only thought diabetics should worry about this. Only if you have diabetes should you then think about managing your glucose levels. And by the way, to manage it, just eat better and exercise more. I mean, come on, we need to give people the hacks, Mark. We need everybody to be using this because it’s so easy.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah, the eat better, people have no clue what that means.
Jessie Inchauspe:
No.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
The other thing I wanted to sort of jump into was hormones, right? We talked about aging. We talked about heart disease, but one of the real problems with sugar is screwing up our hormones, both for men and women. And can you take us down how that works and what goes wrong, and why it’s so common to see such hormonal chaos in this country?
Jessie Inchauspe:
Absolutely. I think one of the conditions that is becoming more and more prevalent, especially in my community I’m noticing that the numbers are increasing so much, is polycystic ovarian syndrome. And this is a condition where women stop getting their period. Their ovaries become burdened with cysts. They start displaying masculine traits, like hair on the chin, balding, et cetera. And this is a something that often we’re told to just medicate, I’ll just take the pill and it’ll fix it. It turns out actually that polycystic ovarian syndrome is a disease of too much insulin. And the way it works is fascinating. So when your body has too much insulin in it, it’s not as good as it was before at converting male hormones into female hormones. So you end up with people who have uteruses who have this excess of testosterone in their body, so their female hormones are just not working anymore.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah, and they grow beards, and they get acne-
Jessie Inchauspe:
And you don’t get your period anymore… Yes.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
And they lose the hair on their head. So women get bald, do you ever see this kind of women with a big round middle and their hair’s all thin and it looks like they’re going bald on top?
Jessie Inchauspe:
Yeah, so many.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
They’ve got the little whiskers going.
Jessie Inchauspe:
It’s heartbreaking, Mark.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
It’s really from sugar.
Jessie Inchauspe:
Yeah, because they don’t know that the reason this is happening is because of too much insulin. And the reason there’s too much insulin is because their glucose levels are out of whack. And so what’s really empowering, I think is when women start applying the principles of science backed stuff that I share because they’re able to get their period back within months. A few women even got pregnant, even though they had been told they were infertile. And this is so empowering, because we have power, we have power. It starts in our plate. And this is really a message of hope. So anybody listening, this can really benefit you. And I hope you’ll find a lot of relief in this information.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah. It’s not your DNA, it’s your dinner.
Jessie Inchauspe:
I love that.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
So here’s the deal, in men, the opposite sort of thing happens. So what happens to men when they eat too much sugar and starch, is they actually produce, because they produce way more fat cells, and the fat cells have a compound called aromatase, which converts testosterone into estrogen. And so the men get man boobs and they get soft skin, and they lose the hair on their bodies so they become more like women. So basically, men become more like women, women become more like men. It creates this massive chaos in the hormones. And I just want to reinforce what you’re saying, because you say glucose. And most people when they think of glucose, they think of sugar, but you should think of bread or sugar or corn flakes in exactly the same way. In fact, bread is the gold standard for measuring glycemic index. And it’s worse than sugar. The score for bread is 100. The score for sugar is 80. So actually you’re better off having the sugar than the bread.
Jessie Inchauspe:
I would disagree, Mark, because in the sugar there’s also fructose and all the things we talked about, the aging, the inflammation, fructose does it at an even a higher rate than glucose alone.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
That’s true.
Jessie Inchauspe:
I would argue that if you have a choice between something starchy and something sweet, I would go for the starchy thing, but better even, have some vegetables first than some protein and fat, and then have the starchy thing. And maybe you won’t even want to have the sugary thing at the end.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah, I think that’s fair. But I also say, if you’re going to have starch, have starch that’s in forms that are coming in a good package. So for example, I have a Japanese purple sweet potato at night. I love that, which is starch, but it’s got full of phytochemicals and fiber, and vitamins and minerals, and I eat the skin. So it’s really actually a very healthy food. And it’s quite different than eating white bread, which is also a starch. So starch is a starch is a starch. It really depends on where it’s coming from, and how it’s metabolized, even oatmeal versus steel cut oats, profoundly different.
Jessie Inchauspe:
Absolutely. And so what I’ve been doing in my work is testing all these things on my own body and using a continuous glucose monitor, showing people the different spikes that happen. So I tested steel cut oats, versus regular oatmeal, and the steel cut has a smaller spike. And same for bread. So white bread is far worse than something like sourdough, for example, which is worse than something like very dark pumpernickel bread that’s all gooey and feels almost like a cake because it’s so rich of fiber, yeah from Germany. So it’s always a spectrum, right? You have to think within a category, there’s different types of bread, different types of potatoes, different types of starch. And you can always make a choice that’s a bit better, and you can always add some fiber to it and some vinegar and go for a walk after.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
So basically throw some Metamucil and some vinegar on your food and you’re good, right?
Jessie Inchauspe:
Pretty much. Yeah. Sounds delicious.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
So tell us some of the surprising things, Jessie, that you learned about your own body, and in researching this about what you thought was okay to eat, but actually wasn’t, or what you thought wasn’t okay to eat, but actually, maybe it was okay.
Jessie Inchauspe:
Well, as I mentioned I used to have donuts for breakfast. So I really got a cold shower in terms of nothing sweet first thing in the morning, because first thing in the morning, when your body is completely fasted, your glucose levels will respond incredibly fast to anything that you ingest. So I realized that if I wanted to eat something sweet, for example, a donut, I should never ever, ever eat it on an empty stomach. I should always eat it after a meal. Then in terms of other surprising things, I mean, oatmeal was a big one, because they even say oatmeal is for diabetics. I mean, there’s all this information that’s very confusing. Yeah, rice cakes… Oh my God.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Oatmeal’s not a health food.
Jessie Inchauspe:
No, it’s not. Rice cakes, a crazy, crazy spike-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Brown rice cakes. How could they be bad?
Jessie Inchauspe:
I tested brown rice versus white rice, literally no difference.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Well, what if you put like a nut butter on top?
Jessie Inchauspe:
Then it’s perfect. That sounds really gross, but it probably works.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
I love, that’s my favorite thing. I get the rice cakes and I put macadamia butter-
Jessie Inchauspe:
Oh, on the rice cake, I thought you meant put the nut butter on actual rice, like warm rice.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
No, no, I mean a rice cake, and you put on the nut butter and it’s kind of good. [crosstalk 00:41:25]. So all of the breakfast things are really in this country, so geared toward extremely high levels of starch and sugar. And in fact-
Jessie Inchauspe:
Fruit juice.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah. Fruit juice is terrible. And I think people need to realize that the most important thing they need to do when they eat in the morning, eat plenty of protein, fat and fiber, because those are the magic tricks to actually keep your blood sugar normal. Protein, fat, and fiber. And you have to learn what foods have protein, fat and fiber. It’s a little bit of a in education because most people may not know, but it actually is the key to success. And you’re basically saying eat protein, fat and fiber before you eat any starch or sugar.
Jessie Inchauspe:
Exactly.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
And that will mitigate all the results.
Jessie Inchauspe:
Exactly. Something else that was very surprising was oat milk, creates a big glucose spike because it’s made-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Oh, no more oat milk lattes? The oat milk lattes, no way on?
Jessie Inchauspe:
Yeah. People got really sad when I posted that test, I was like, I’m sorry, I know you guys love your oat milk, but it’s just a big bowl of glucose. It’s dessert. Have it as dessert. Don’t have it first thing in the morning on an empty stomach. And then fruit was actually quite surprising to me, Mark, because I learned that fruit have been bred for trees to be extra sweet and extra juicy, and contain lots of glucose and fructose, especially grapes.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah. Grapes are the worst.
Jessie Inchauspe:
You eat 20 grapes, super big glucose spikes. So I learned that anytime I have fruit, always put clothes on it. I’m French, so grapes and cheese. I actually just posted that test yesterday on my Instagram GlucoseGoddess, if anybody wants to see it. If you add cheese to the grapes, the glucose spike is smaller because you’re adding this fat-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
But it’s still there. It’s still there.
Jessie Inchauspe:
But it’s still there. Yeah, so have it as dessert. Yeah. Pineapple, bananas, definitely always put some clothes on those. And I’ve really completely changed the way I ate, Mark. I mean now for breakfast, I have leftovers. This morning I have leftover green beans and cauliflower and two eggs. I don’t have cravings anymore-
Dr. Mark Hyman:
So dinner for breakfast.
Jessie Inchauspe:
Dinner for breakfast, dinner for breakfast, I feel better than I ever have. And I’m older than I ever have. I feel so good. I don’t have any cravings. I have energy throughout the day. I don’t even drink coffee anymore because I have so much energy just naturally. I mean I sleep amazingly. It’s very powerful.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
That’s amazing. So you basically have learned how to hack, now what other foods you thought were bad for you that actually weren’t so bad?
Jessie Inchauspe:
Well, there was this whole thing about fat is bad for you, fat makes you fat and fat’s not good. And I learned that actually that’s not the case. What drives heart disease the most is fructose in your liver, creating low density LDL. And that fat is actually your friend. And so I started putting way more avocado and avocado oils and olive oil, and good fats like that, eating more fish. And that really helped stabilize my glucose levels. Other foods that I thought were bad that were actually good. I think it was mostly the other way around. It was lots of foods I thought were good that were actually bad. What about yourself? What did you discover?
Dr. Mark Hyman:
So fruit, right?
Jessie Inchauspe:
Yeah, fruit.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
I think fruit has, you have to be careful with fruit because it depends on the fruit. It depends on how sweet it is, how it was bred and the kind of fruit. When you go kind of get a wild fruit, they’re very sweet, but they’re very small. And I think-
Jessie Inchauspe:
Oh, dried fruit is another big one.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Oh, dried fruit’s terrible. Yeah. Dried fruit’s like candy, it’s just like candy.
Jessie Inchauspe:
And now what I do when I want something fruity, I’ll have one of your shakes, the berries with nut butter and lots of nuts in them, chia seeds, almond milk, that kind of stuff. And that makes for a very satisfying fruity little snack, but that contains all this extra protein and fat and fiber to minimize the spike.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah. That’s one of my favorite things, I call it a fat shake. So you basically take nuts of any kind, throw in a bunch of nuts, like almonds, walnuts, you can take pumpkin seeds, chia seeds, flaxseeds, hemp seeds, and then throw in some berries-
Jessie Inchauspe:
Frozen berries.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Frozen berries. I put even cranberries in there. Maybe throw some lemon in. Maybe I’ll throw a couple of tablespoons of nut butter sometimes, to make it creamier. And you put in some nonsweetened macadamia milk. I hope macadamia milk’s not bad because I use that a lot. I got to check that out. [inaudible 00:45:44] you be telling me it’s like oat milk, I’m like, oh boy.
Jessie Inchauspe:
It comes from nuts so it’s fine.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
It’s good. Okay. And you blend it up and you can throw in greens in there. You can throw an avocado in there, I throw [crosstalk 00:45:58].
Jessie Inchauspe:
Put some cacao nibs on top.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Oh yeah. Cacao nibs are good. So you can make a really yummy smoothie that’s basically not from processed powders, but actually from whole foods. I have that recipe in my book, Ultra Simple Diet, I’m sorry, The 10 Day Detox Diet, which has that recipe in it.
Jessie Inchauspe:
And you can add some protein powder too.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
You can add some protein powder. And I think, particularly in terms of muscle mass, it’s really important, and the science is so clear on this, that we need high quality protein in the morning, particularly, to load up, to build muscle synthesis, we need about 30 grams.
Jessie Inchauspe:
We don’t eat enough protein.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
We need high quality protein, which has to include amino acids that are found primarily in meat or animal products. Now, if you’re a vegan, you have to figure out how to get those extra amino acids. You have to supply amino acid powders and add them in because if you don’t have Lucine, which is very low in plant proteins, you can’t trigger protein synthesis. In other words, building muscle is critical. And you look at, I mean, not judgmentally here, but if you look at most vegans, they tend to lose a lot of muscle mass. And the longer they’ve been on a vegan diet, the worse their muscle loss is, and oh, they’re thin, they look good, their weight’s great, but no, they actually can be metabolically unhealthy. In fact, they can get what we call atophe, which is thin on the outside, fat on the inside, or metabolically obese, normal weight, we call it, or otherwise called skinny fat.
Jessie Inchauspe:
Most commonly known as skinny fat.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah. You look skinny, but you’re really fat. And that actually is just as dangerous as actually being overweight in terms of risk for heart attacks, diabetes, strokes, all the same risk factors. So I think people need to understand that you’ve got to look under the hood. You’ve got to look at what’s going on. So maybe you’re a vegan and you’re like, okay, well, how am I going to get protein in the morning? I don’t want to eat meat, or I have a whey protein shake, but what can I do? Well, you kind of have to look at your own biology. And I encourage people to look at their continuous glucose monitoring. I encourage people, and measure fasting insulin, even measuring a two hour post meal insulin level, which most doctors will not order, but you can try to get them to order it. And if not you can just maybe order it yourself. There are now companies where you can order stuff yourself. But I think it’s really important, you can go to IHOP and have breakfast-
Jessie Inchauspe:
Yeah, you said that in your podcast with Casey or your Instagram live, you said just eat something that has a bunch of glucose, eat a bunch of rice and then two hours later, go get your insulin and your glucose tested and you’ll know.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah. So that’s really important. So the tips you gave are so important, the sequencing of food. I mean, even if you have a glass of wine, and I mean the worst thing in restaurants, because what do they do. You want a drink? Here’s a bread basket. It’s like the worst possible thing you could actually do for your health.
Jessie Inchauspe:
Actually Mark, if you think about it, if you’re a restaurant owner and you want people to order a bunch of stuff at your restaurant, that’s what you do because you give them bread, they eat the bread first, big glucose spike, 90 minutes later, they’re crashing. So they’re super hungry and they want to order dessert, I mean, it’s brilliant.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Of course.
Jessie Inchauspe:
It’s brilliant.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Of course. Exactly, exactly. And I wonder if they know that or it’s just sort of a habit, but it’s a sure way to get people to order more food.
Jessie Inchauspe:
Absolutely.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
And I think drinking wine, the timing of the food, when you eat what matters. It’s not just about time restricted eating, but it’s even the sequence of eating and a meal. It’s actually the combinations of the food that you eat, like you said, don’t eat naked carbs. That’s a really important concept. The vinegar thing is a very cool hack. The walking after eating really important, getting your muscles to work and suck up the glucose, super important. Were there any other surprises or things you learned as part of your investigations, your scientific sort of diving into your own biology?
Jessie Inchauspe:
Maybe we can talk a little bit about alcohol because I think this is one of the places where context is very important, to think about the fact that glucose is not everything. So if you just have a glucose monitor and you drink two bottles of wine, your glucose levels will stay steady, and they might even decrease actually because the alcohol is interfering with your liver’s job to release glucose into the bloodstream. But the issue is you might think, oh, well my glucose levels is study, this must mean that this food is good for me. And on the completely opposite end of that spectrum, I discovered that when I exercised, I sometimes saw a glucose spike. So if I was just looking at my glucose, everything from the glucose lens, I would think, okay, wine good for me, exercise bad for me.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Sounds like a great plan, how do I get on that health plan? Let’s see, a bottle of wine and skip the exercise. Okay. No?
Jessie Inchauspe:
Perfect. Well, then you’ll have steady glucose levels, but you’re going to get severely sick. And I realized, okay, there’s some instances in which it’s important to look beyond glucose. So in the case of alcohol, yes, it keeps your glucose level steady because it’s hurting your liver. That’s not a reason to drink alcohol. Similarly, when you exercise, you might see glucose spike because your liver is releasing all this glucose so that your mitochondria can make energy, but the downsides of the glucose spikes. So the toasting, the inflammation, et cetera, are actually counteracted by all the positive sides of exercise. So in the balance, it’s a positive effect on the body. So I learned about nuance, it became very important. And it’s very interesting when you start diving into it, but you definitely need context if you wear a glucose monitor for the first time, you need to have some information to make sure you understand these pitfalls.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
It’s interesting. I had the same experience. I had a good protein shake. My blood sugar, I had my continuous glucose monitor on, it maybe went up to 90 after my protein shake in the morning, I thought I’m going to go play tennis. And I really worked out hard. I had a great tennis game and then I checked my glucose, I’m like, it’s going to be really good. I checked it and I was like, holy crap, it’s 145. And I texted Casey right away. I was like, what’s up with this? She’s like, yeah, well, that’s normal. Because when you exercise, you increase cortisol, you increase your blood sugar, you increase adrenaline, you actually release glycogen from your muscles. So yes, when you’re running from the tiger, you want to release a lot of glucose so you can fuel your muscles. But the body doesn’t really know that there’s tennis, it just knows that you’re running, because you’re chasing a tiger or you’re being chased by a tiger.
Jessie Inchauspe:
Yeah. On the topic of being chased by a tiger, I also saw a massive glucose spike after I gave a presentation to the whole company when I was working in Silicon Valley, and I was quite stressed out. And after the presentation I checked my glucose levels and a just huge spike to 200, but very short and rapid spike. And that was because my body was preparing for me to run far away and fast from the tiger, so it released all this glucose into my bloodstream. And it was really cool to just be able to see what was happening and to understand inner working. Then of course, it got me just incredibly curious and that’s how this whole journey started.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
That’s an important point you’re making, that stress alone causes you to have imbalanced blood sugar. And stress alone will release cortisol, which then causes you to increase your glucose levels and to become diabetic and to become more insulin resistant. So short term spikes of cortisol are great. You need them to wake up in the morning, go deal with any kind of urgently stressful situation. But it’s the chronic low level stress and unmitigated unremitting stress that actually causes us to have these metabolic problems down the road. So stress actually makes you gain weight.
Jessie Inchauspe:
Yeah. And poor sleep as well, Mark. So I discovered, I used to have a cappuccino every morning and I discovered that on the days where I was rested, the cappuccino wouldn’t create a big spike. But then on the days where I was tired, the cappuccino would create a much bigger spike in my body. So I did the research and I found out that when you’re not rested, your body has a harder time dealing with any influx of glucose into your system.
Jessie Inchauspe:
So what I found out is that the days when I’m feeling tired, to put all the chances on my side to not create a big glucose rollercoaster, always savory breakfast, like non-negotiable. And then I try to get in 10 minutes of high intensity exercise very soon after I wake up. So jumping jacks, whatever, put on a YouTube video, like 10 minute HIIT class, and this helps my body become more insulin sensitive. And so I don’t create this big spike from that cappuccino, because what’s so awful, and so vicious is that when you’re tired, you really crave sugar even more, because you’re feeling like it’s going to give you energy. But the problem is that same sugar that you’re going to eat will create a bigger spike than usual putting you on the cravings rollercoaster. And then you’re going to crave even more sugar. So anybody tired, use the hacks even more. It’s even more important.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
I remember that, and I worked in the emergency room and I wouldn’t sleep all night. I mean, I literally would like go to the 11 o’clock at night shift. I would have a quadruple espresso, a half a pint of ice cream and a giant chocolate chip cookie. And then I would go to work.
Jessie Inchauspe:
No. Okay, so you’re throwing shade on my Nutella crepe, but you were doing some pretty naughty stuff too.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
I was jacking myself to get through the night so I could actually stay up all night and see patients. And then I would kind of crash at three in the morning, or two or three in the morning, I’d go to the McDonald and I’d get an apple strudel and a bunch of French fries… And it was the only thing open in the hospital in the middle of the night. And I think the data is so clear that when you are sleep deprived, and they’ve done this with healthy volunteers, your ghrelin levels or ghrelin levels go up, which makes you hungry. And the hormone that keeps you having a break on your appetite, called PYY goes down. And so you end up in this double whammy where the thing that’s supposed to make you stop eating is shut off. And the thing that makes you want to eat more and more goes up just from lack of sleep.
Jessie Inchauspe:
Yeah. And it’s vicious because you feel like the sweet stuff is giving you energy. But then as we know, it’s actually harming the long term ability of your mitochondria to make energy. So you think that the apple strudel is giving you energy. It’s giving you pleasure, but long term it’s harming you.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Amazing. So to close here, what is the typical day in the life of a GlucoseGoddess look like?
Jessie Inchauspe:
Okay. So let’s see, morning leftovers for breakfast. So as I mentioned for this morning, it was leftover cauliflower and green beans, and onion, and then I had some eggs. Then what often happens to me, Mark, is that as I’m going for my walk in the morning, I’ll see something that looks really tasty, usually it’s chocolate based. And so what I do now is that I buy the tasty thing, but I don’t eat it right then. I tell myself, I’ll have it for dessert after my lunch. So before lunch, tall glass of water with some vinegar in it, lunch is usually lots of greens, some nice protein, I eat everything. So it’s probably going to be some meat or chicken or fish. And then I have the little sweet thing that I bought for myself. And then I go for a walk or I work out, or I do some exercise, whatever it is or I dance around, do my laundry.
Jessie Inchauspe:
And then for the evening, if I have friends over, what I’ll do is I’ll do a big plate of vegetables that people can munch on while I’m cooking. So in France we have this thing called [inaudible 00:57:23], which is raw vegetables, carrots, cucumbers, maybe with some hummus, some avocado. So people munch on that. And then for dinner, I’ll serve more vegetables, some protein and fats that people will eat in second, and then some starches. So actually your purple Japanese potato really got me inspired. So I’ll do that one next time, and people know to eat that last for sure. And then I get everybody up, we go for a walk around the block. So when people get back, they have a lot of energy and they help me clean up the kitchen. It’s as simple as that.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
There you go. That’s so beautiful. And I think you’re a great example, and it’s important for people listening to understand that everybody’s different. So you’re basically a healthy, thin young woman. But if you are not metabolically resilient, you’ve learned how to balance your blood sugar in the context of overall metabolic health. But if you’re very metabolically unhealthy, which accounts for 88% of Americans, and everybody sort of in that somewhere on the spectrum, from mild to really severe, to Type 2 diabetes, you might not actually be able to eat some of the things that you’re talking about yet. So the key is, you can become metabolically resilient, but you have to go through that process first of making your muscle smarter, your insulin receptor smarter, lowering inflammation, fixing your microbiome, fixing your liver. And it’s a lot of stuff to do, but it’s easy to do.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
All you have to do is follow a very simple, low sugar starch diet. And I’ve written a book called The 10 Day Detox Diet, which essentially is that, it’s inflammatory, detoxifying, glucose balancing. And we had a woman who was on insulin for 10 years, and in three days she was off her insulin, in a month she lowered or three months, she lowered her A1C, which is an average blood sugar from 11, which is stupid high, it’s dangerously high to normal 5.5. In just three months of her eating real food that balanced her blood sugar. So do you think everybody should try one of these continuous glucose monitors?
Jessie Inchauspe:
I’m divided to be honest, because first of all they’re expensive right now. I think they’re very, very, very interesting. I think if you can afford it, 100%. If you can’t afford it, use my hacks because they’ll get you a long way to balancing your glucose levels without necessarily needing one. But if you can, yes, it’s life changing to be able to speak to your body and see what’s going on on the inside. It’s very motivating. It opens a door of curiosity and excitement, and then you can see the hacks in action. It’s very cool. I mean, it changed my life, so of course.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah. And I think people can do it. I think some people need to do it long term, but some of that you can try for two weeks or four weeks, and start to really tune into what’s happening on the inside. It’s just the beginning of this year of quantified self. I think you’ve been a great example of someone who’s really taken the bull by the horns and actually looked at what’s going on and changed your own health and your own understanding of biology. And you’re sharing that knowledge in your incredible new book, which is out now, everybody should check it out. Glucose Revolution, The Life-changing Power of Balancing your Blood Sugar. And it’s absolutely true. I’ve been on this train for a long time. Thank you for joining it and helping to lead it now so I can go take a vacation.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
And just keep it up, because this is so great information and we should check out her work at GlucoseGoddess, Instagram, and get the book. And anybody listening who’s struggled with their blood sugar, who’ve learned how to balance it, who’ve learned about the [inaudible 01:00:52] themselves even through the CGM monitoring, share with us on our comments. We’d love to hear from you. Share this with your friends and family because 88% of them are metabolically unhealthy. I know they need this. Subscribe wherever you get your podcast and we’ll see you next time on the Doctor’s Farmacy.
Closing:
Hi everyone. I hope you enjoyed this week’s episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or a other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you’re looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you’re looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner database. It’s important that you have someone in your corner who’s trained, who’s a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.
