Your Baby's Metabolism is Being Decided Right Now with Jessie Inchauspé

Mark Hyman, MD

Full Transcript

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Dr. Mark Hyman
Your womb is not just an avid.

Jessie Inchauspé
It's more like your baby is a seed and you're the soil. And if you plant this seed in your driveway full of gravel, it's not gonna grow as strong and healthy as if you plant it in a nice piece of soil. You're cocreating your baby's genetic plan with your diet. The placenta is not a filter. The placenta does not keep out all the bad and give only the good to your baby.

Ninety percent of pregnant moms are below the minimum recommended amount of choline during pregnancy, even though this nutrient builds their baby's brains. We're lying to moms. What happens during pregnancy is very important for the health of their baby. At conception, your baby's DNA is set. But the epigenetics, which genes are switched on, which genes are silenced, that has to do with your diet during pregnancy.

The food you eat sends a sort of like postcard to your baby, telling him what world he's gonna be born into.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Jesse Incersepi is a French biochemist. She's a founder and international best selling author behind the global glucose guidance movement, helping millions stabilize blood sugar for better energy, mood, and metabolic health.

Jessie Inchauspé
If a mom has low protein intake during pregnancy, her baby is epigenetically programmed to have lower muscle mass. Muscle is the organ of longevity.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You're literally writing the genetic expression software. Jesse, it's so good to see you again and have you on the podcast. I can't believe the journey you've been on for the last, I guess, four years since we first talked. Yeah. I think I was in Maui.

It was COVID. You just come out with your new book, and my friend's like, hey. Would you talk to my friend Jesse? I'm like, sure. It's a good topic.

The glucose goddess sounds good. I'm all about blood sugar, and you've blown up. It's amazing. It's amazing. Congratulations.

Wow. Because I've been, you know, beating that blood sugar horn for quite a while. And

Jessie Inchauspé
Well, you're the OG of blood sugar. Let's be real. I wouldn't exist if it weren't for you, Mark.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I know about that. Yeah. But I think I think, you know, people are finally coming to terms with this. And now the new dietary guidelines have basically said, hey. Eat more protein, eat less sugar.

Don't eat ultra processed food, highly processed food. I mean, it's pretty amazing the turnaround we've seen in just

Jessie Inchauspé
Absolutely.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So you got a new book Uh-huh. And a new baby.

Jessie Inchauspé
Absolutely. Yes.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And I imagine that your new baby inspired your new book.

Jessie Inchauspé
Completely. Which is called He's prototype.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Nine months that count forever. It drives me absolutely crazy when obstetricians say to their patients, eat whatever you want. It's important to gain weight when you're pregnant. I'm like, have a pint of ice cream. Eat cookies.

I'm like, are you out of your mind? So we're gonna get into all all the nutrition pregnancy details and why it matters so much, and some of the research particularly around epigenetics and how people understand that. Before we dive in, I want you to share a bit about your story. You know, your book is nine months to count forever, and it's very personal for you.

Jessie Inchauspé
Mhmm.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You had a baby. So take me back to when you were 31 and when you had your first pregnancy and kinda walk me through the journey to how you got to this moment where you wanna tell the world that pregnant women should pay attention to what they eat.

Jessie Inchauspé
Well, I was very naive. I thought, you know, hey. I'm the glucose goddess. I'm gonna have a perfect pregnancy. I'm gonna have no nausea.

Everything's gonna go perfectly great. You know, cuckoo. And I was proven very wrong. So my first pregnancy, first of all, I was very nauseous in the first trimester. It's brutal.

And then, unfortunately, I had what's called a silent miscarriage at three months, meaning the embryo had stopped developing, but I had no idea. I didn't experience a miscarriage. I learned at the three month ultrasound that the embryo had stopped developing three weeks earlier, that I was carrying a dead embryo in my uterus for this long. So it was it was awful. I would say probably the hardest emotional challenge of my life.

I remember telling my husband that if feelings could kill, I feel like I would be dead. Yeah. And that was the amount of angst and depression that I felt for months afterwards.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Jessie Inchauspé
It was very tough. And I realized, you know, many women experiences miss experience miscarriages, but it's not talked about at all. I learned after I went through the journey, I learned that my mom had had miscarriages, and she had never told me. That my stepmom had, that my grandmother had, all of a sudden, started talking. So I wanted to share my story about this because it can happen to everybody.

Even if you're doing all the, quote, unquote, right stuff, these things happen. Chromosomal abnormalities, things we don't yet understand. And I share my story in the book because it's very important for me that anybody going through this feels less alone. I felt so alone. You know what I did?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Blame yourself.

Jessie Inchauspé
You blame yourself. And I was like, maybe it's because I had too much coffee because there are studies showing high levels of caffeine can impact early pregnancy. And I was googling, like, celebrities who have had miscarriages. I just wanted to hear stories. I wanted to know that it happens to Yeah.

A lot of people, and it's it's not our fault. So after that, I got pregnant again.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And by the way Yeah. As a doctor, I've delivered 500 babies. Miscarriages are are the body's natural way of taking care of something that's not right. Like you said I

Jessie Inchauspé
know, but it's still super hard.

Dr. Mark Hyman
But yeah. But but usually don't know that. Like, you don't you don't know that it's kind of nature's way of taking care of things that aren't

Jessie Inchauspé
It is. Yet, you know, as a mom to be, you're projecting. You're like, oh, my baby's gonna be born in December, and you create this whole story in your head. So when you have the miscarriage, you have to disconnect and detach and grieve that story that you had. So I get the I get the scientific reason, but the emotional journey was just very, very hard.

And I just wanna hold space for people who go through that to say, even though it's nature doing its job, it's still really, really freaking hard.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It's hard. It's emotionally really hard.

Jessie Inchauspé
In any case, I got pregnant again. I was very lucky. And my boy was born in May 2025, so he's about seven, eight months now. And as I was pregnant, you know, because my job is scientific research, I was like, let me see what I can do during pregnancy. Because my doctor was just saying, take folate and don't stress.

And a bit like you said, you know, eat enough so that your baby has enough calories, essentially. But the research showed otherwise. I found incredible studies, incredible data showing that what I ate during pregnancy was influencing my baby. Like, DNA is one thing, but your diet during pregnancy impacts the baby that you give birth to. You're cocreating your baby's genetic plan with your diet.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You say your baby's your your womb is not just an oven. It's like

Jessie Inchauspé
Exactly. You're not it's not just a bun in the oven. It's more like your baby is a seed, and you're the soil. And if you plant this seed in your driveway full of gravel, it's not gonna grow as strong and healthy as if you plant it in a nice piece of soil, fertilized and dense and rich. So you're cocreating your baby's genetic plan.

You're not just an oven. Your baby will not just take what he needs from you. That's another big myth of pregnancy. If you don't eat enough of the right stuff, your baby's not gonna get enough of it. You are cocreating your baby's plan.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Although although it does it does deplete you. Like, if you

Jessie Inchauspé
It depletes you. And for example, if you don't eat enough, let's say, choline, which comes from eggs or animal foods, your baby will pull from your reserves up to a point. Your baby will never get all the choline that he needs if you're not eating enough of it. Mhmm. And the placenta, as you know, is this temporary organ that we grow in our uterus that brings our bloodstream and our baby's bloodstream in very close connection.

The placenta is not a filter, Mark. The placenta does not keep out all the bad and give only the good to your baby. The placenta kinda trusts that whatever's in your bloodstream belongs in your baby's bloodstream.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Like mercury.

Jessie Inchauspé
Like mercury, but also like glucose. Like glucose. So the higher a mom's glucose levels during pregnancy, the higher the baby's glucose level in the womb. Yeah. And a baby has to deal with high glucose levels in the womb as well in case they're too high.

So your baby will feel inflammation. Your baby will put on fat to protect himself. So blood sugar was the first place I dove in, and it was just so incredibly interesting.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I mean, one of the biggest things, you know, that doctors check for is just facial diabetes. At 28, you get a blood sugar test where they give you this two Cokes equivalent of sugar, basically. And you drink it, and you measure your blood sugar, you know, an hour and two hours after. And it's amazing how how many women have blood sugar dysregulation, and it's a sign that they're already kind of on their way to insulin resistance.

And the problem in America is that ninety three percent of us have some degree of that. Mhmm. Right? Seventy five percent overweight, but ninety three percent, even if you're thin, you could have sugar issues. And, you know, we have now, you know, one in two people in America with prediabetes or type two diabetes.

But I think it's it's actually more than that because I think the criteria are just strange, actually.

Jessie Inchauspé
Yeah. And and the gestational diabetes is not just about the mom. So if you have gestational diabetes, the studies show that your baby's DNA will be epigenetically programmed to be more likely to get diabetes himself during his lifetime. So at conception, when the egg meets the sperm, your baby's DNA is set. But the epigenetics, meaning the sort of programming of your baby's DNA, which genes are switched on, which genes are silenced, that has to do with your diet during pregnancy.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I just wanna stop you there because, you know, what you're talking about is epigenetics, and most people may not know what that means. I'm gonna just take two seconds to summarize it. You've got 20,000 genes, more or less. How do how do genes work? They they have to be expressed, so the gene has to be turned on or off.

And there's a mechanism for that, which is epi the epigenome, which is a regulator which genes get turned on or off depending on what you do. And they have massive influence on our health. And what has come out in the research, which is quite stunning, it's not just about diabetes. Everything. So cancer, heart disease, diabetes, everything that is is happening inside the womb that the baby is exposed to, we call it the exposome, is influencing the epigenetic programming that's laid on top of your genome that determines the health outcomes of the baby when they're 20, 30, 40, 50.

It's real so it's really important.

Jessie Inchauspé
And that's the thing we don't tell moms. We say just eat for two. You know? Eat enough, and you're gonna gain weight anyway, so you might as well eat more pancakes. We're lying to moms.

No. What happens during pregnancy is very important for the health of their baby. Yeah. And the epigenetic data is interesting. So we see in gestational diabetes that genes, that encode for type two diabetes risk are higher in the babies of, in the babies of moms who had gestational diabetes.

And in animal studies, Mark, which is really interesting, they see that when a mom eats a high sugar diet during pregnancy in rats, even if she doesn't have diabetes, her baby has fat storage genes epigenetically activated. Yeah. So high sugar diet during pregnancy could also, in humans, be leading to this epigenetic switch, which means that your baby, from the moment he's born, is more vulnerable to fat gain, to weight gain. And it makes sense biologically because if you have a lot of sugar in the womb, your baby needs to convert that sugar into fat to protect himself from high sugar levels. Yeah.

And that's one of the consequences of, you know, high glucose diet is that you transform some of that glucose. That's one of the reasons that high glucose levels lead to more fat gain because you're transforming that glucose into fat to protect yourself. And so in these rat studies, we see that the children, the moment they're born, they have this fat storage gene activated, and they end up having more fat mass on their body than their peers even if they eat the exact same diet from birth onwards.

Dr. Mark Hyman
These are the epigenetic changes.

Jessie Inchauspé
Exactly. And we need to tell moms about this. We need to explain that epigenetics is something that you control. Now I don't think we should guilt trip moms and say, never eat any sugar. It's really hard.

I had cravings. I was nauseous. I could only eat, like, croissant and pain au chocolat the first three months. So I know firsthand how hard

Dr. Mark Hyman
it is. The the wheat's different. The croissants are smaller.

Jessie Inchauspé
Yes. For sure. But there's actually data, Mark

Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, now you're making me crazy. I wanna go to Paris Saint Croissant.

Jessie Inchauspé
Yeah. Come hang out. But there's data actually in animals also showing that during pregnancy, you get more dopamine from the same amount of sugar that you eat. So you may be getting more pleasure from that croissant when you're pregnant. So you have cravings.

You have nausea. You don't feel so good. And so eating sugar becomes something that is, more common. And in fact, today, most moms eat more sugar during pregnancy than when they're not pregnant. This is from a survey in The US.

So what do we do about all this? Well, we learn about the glucose hacks, which I've been talking about for years, but these can also help in pregnancy. So no sugar first thing in the morning. You have a protein rich breakfast because sugar first thing in the morning is just gonna exacerbate those cravings, and you really don't wanna go there. And I think we should look at the WHO guidelines of 25 grams of added sugar per day being the maximum.

Today, most moms eat 80 grams of added sugar per day during pregnancy. So if we could just get below that 25 grams, it would be super, super helpful.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And that's actually twice what they wanted to do, but Donald Rumsfeld, when he was working for president Bush, went to the WHO when they were trying to lower the sugar because he was in the food industry before. He said, we're gonna pull $400,000,000 of funding from the WHO if you do this.

Jessie Inchauspé
Are you serious? Yeah. Know that.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I wrote about my book Food Tricks. It's it's so corrupt. So basically, the WHO wanted 5% of diet added sugar, and then Rumsfeld wanted 10%, and the food industry won. So basically, you're really talking about this in a way that I'd really never seen before.

I mean, there's books on pregnancy nutrition, but like, to really go into the depth of understanding what should be a way to create a healthy baby through food. I mean, there's many other things you can do when you're pregnant, exercise and sleep and rest and, you know, so forth. But how do you help people think about the big topics, the building blocks of of building a healthy diet when you are pregnant. Because people you started with, you know, don't eat sugar for breakfast, which is basically what everybody has. Muffins, bagels, croissants, you know, sugary yogurts, pancakes, French toast, waffles.

Jessie Inchauspé
Fruit smoothies.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Smoothies. I mean, what makes me crazy, especially, is this new protein

Jessie Inchauspé
Trend?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Trend. Dunkin' muffins. Yeah. Dunkin' Donuts now has protein smoothies, but they're just full of sugar. Yeah.

So you gotta eat real foods. So tell us more about how you think about this.

Jessie Inchauspé
So the first one is has to do with blood sugar and glucose management. It's very important. And the second so I have four, basically, pregnancy pillars I talk about in the book. The second one is choline. Yeah.

Choline is a nutrient that builds your baby's brain cells and builds the neurotransmitters, meaning the way that your that his brain cells communicate with each other. Okay? Choline is super important. It's in foods like eggs.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Highest sources of eggs.

Jessie Inchauspé
Well, actually, highest source is animal liver. So it depends if you eat it during pregnancy or not. Egg yolk. Exactly. Liver, if

Dr. Mark Hyman
you can eat it, is one of the most nutritionally dense foods. I love it. I mean, I grew up on it. Like, I'm Jewish, so chicken liver, you know, chopped liver was a big thing. Yeah.

But it's it's really incredibly nutritionally dense. Mean, if

Jessie Inchauspé
Very important.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Google it, you know, compared to any of the most nutritious vegetables on the planet, it's ores of magnitude more nutritiously dense.

Jessie Inchauspé
And today, we don't eat organ meats anymore. We eat just, you know, muscle meat, which has very important nutrition in it. But so egg yolks are very high source of choline. Any animal food, actually. So we're talking, you know, a chicken, salmon, beef, those are really good sources of choline.

There's a little bit of choline in plant foods, but really not that much. To get as much choline as in one egg yolk, you would have to eat two kilos of soybeans. So four pounds of soybeans. So if you're vegan, you have to supplement in choline. And actually today, Mark, ninety percent of pregnant moms are below the minimum recommended amount of choline during pregnancy.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Wow.

Jessie Inchauspé
Even though this nutrient builds their babies' brains. And in animal studies, when you deplete a mom's choline levels, you give her no choline during pregnancy. The development of her baby's brain is deeply affected.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's such an important thing.

Jessie Inchauspé
Fewer neurons, brain development stopping earlier than it should in animals. In humans, we can't do that. We can't say, let's take a group of moms and another group and deplete one group and see the outcomes in the babies. What we can do is supplement moms and see what happens because most moms need to eat more choline. And in fact, the American Association of Pediatrics says that failure to provide choline during this critical time can lead to irreparable brain damage, even if there's more choline during the child's life afterwards.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's crazy. I mean

Jessie Inchauspé
And we don't talk about it even though these big guidelines exist.

Dr. Mark Hyman
The top source is egg yolks, which often were seen to be a bad food because it has cholesterol in it. But, actually, the the dietary guidelines in 2015 said cholesterol is no longer a nutrient of concern in, like, the fine print.

Jessie Inchauspé
Mhmm.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I didn't wanna advertise that they've been wrong for so many decades. But when you're talking about neurodevelopmental issues, people don't realize that one in six babies is born with a neurodevelopmental issue. And it ends up as learning disabilities, ADD, autism, the whole spectrum. And that's a lot. One in six kids.

And and so when you say that ninety percent of women are deficient in this, it seems easy to fix. So

Jessie Inchauspé
Four eggs a day and you fix it.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Four eggs a day.

Jessie Inchauspé
And in this there's two really interesting clinical trials I wanna mention where they've supplemented moms with enough choline. So the first one is from Cornell University. And they took two groups. One group of moms got four hundred and thirty milligrams per day, which is basically the bare minimum recommendation. And the other group of moms got nine hundred milligrams a day, which is even more than the recommendation.

And then the scientists wanted to see if they could measure differences in the kids. Yeah. And they saw that in that first year of age, the kids who had had more choline in the womb were reacting faster to this very important test, which is just a image reaction test, like how quickly does the baby react images, but it's connected to IQ as an adult. That's why this test is used. And they saw that in the choline babies, there was 10% faster reaction time during those that first year of age.

So the amount of choline available in the womb seems to be shaping the development of the brain in a way that we can measure. And there's many things we can't measure. We can't measure how it feels to be in someone's brain. It's possible that if you have enough choline, you'll just feel better in your brain. And when I learned about these studies, I called my mom because I've had a lot of mental health issues in my life.

So I was like, mom, how many eggs did you eat when you were pregnant with me? And she was like, oh, honey, I ate barely any eggs. She ate special k, sugar, and orange juice. So for sure, I didn't have enough choline. So for sure, my mom is to blame for everything.

No. I'm kidding. But it matters. There's another study also showing placebo group, that's receiving zero choline and another group that's receiving nine hundred and thirty milligrams of choline during pregnancy. And the scientists then looked at the kids at three years old, and they sent the parents a questionnaire asking their asking about their kids.

So is he patient? Is he cruel to animals? How well tempered is he? Is he this is a questionnaire that it's linked to adult mental health issues, and the choline group did better on the results of this questionnaire. So we could detect differences in the baby's behavior at three years old depending on how much choline was given to

Dr. Mark Hyman
the mothers. Should women take choline supplements?

Jessie Inchauspé
You don't need to. You don't need to because it's much better absorbed from eggs, for example. So if you have four eggs a day, you're getting the bare minimum. Plus if you have two other sources of animal food during the day, you're gonna get to seven hundred milligrams, which is really high. You can supplement, especially if you're vegan and you don't eat any animal foods, you must supplement with choline.

It's very important.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean, four eggs is six hundred milligrams. I mean, you were saying nine hundred milligrams, and people don't really wanna eat four eggs.

Jessie Inchauspé
So know, but it's important. I didn't really wanna eat four eggs. I did it anyway because I was like,

Dr. Mark Hyman
I need

Jessie Inchauspé
to get enough choline.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You know? And you're saying it's better utilized than taking oral choline?

Jessie Inchauspé
It's it's better absorbed. Yes. You can also take supplements of choline if you want. In a lot of, like, sort of forward cutting edge prenatal supplements, you'll find choline. But moms are not told about this, Mark.

And, actually, in formula, which is, you know, milk for babies, they put choline in there because they know it's important. But somehow, nobody's telling pregnant moms to also do that during pregnancy. Like, what's going on? Why is this information not being communicated? It's very confusing.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It's it's one of those things you bring up that was you know, I I was aware of, but it it's something that, you know, most people don't know and and doesn't get talked about, and most obstetricians don't recommend for their patients.

Jessie Inchauspé
And Needs to change.

Dr. Mark Hyman
If you can tolerate liver, I highly recommend it. Beef liver has, you know, a lot more.

Jessie Inchauspé
It's a very good source of choline.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Chicken liver is great. So I think that's a that's an important that I think most people will not know about. We kind of jumped over the glucose. There's four pillars. So I wanna I wanna come back to the glucose thing because it's such a big thing.

And we have such an epidemic of diabetes and obesity, and it's literally programmed in your genes if you eat a lot of sugar when you're pregnant. And it's not just sugar. It's anything that turns to sugar. So white flour, refined starches, ultra processed food, it's it's everywhere. It's it's it's almost impossible not to eat that if you're, you know, a free ranging human.

You know? And and you have to

Jessie Inchauspé
be You don't grow your own food.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Yeah. If you have to be very diligent. You know, most people shop and buy stuff, and they don't even aware of what's in it. And you go out to eat, or you go to, you know, try to food graze when you're in the airport, or I mean, it's everywhere.

Like, it's just amazing. You go to Starbucks, and it's like, just sugar. You know? Like, it's just sugar. And and I I went I went to buy, like, a green juice.

I'm like, oh, green juice. I mean, look. I'm like, 37 grams of sugar. That's how much almost is in a can of Coke.

Jessie Inchauspé
And that's way past the 25 grams recommended maximum amount Yeah. By the WHO. There's a really cool thing that I wanna share. So in The UK in 1940, the government started a sugar ration. I don't know if you knew this.

Before thirteen years, the entire population of The UK was given only only 40 grams of sugar per day versus before the ration, they were at about 80 grams per day, which is very high. But it was the war, and they had to ration the the import of sugar. And this meant that everybody in the country, including pregnant moms, all of a sudden dropped their sugar intake by half. And so recently, scientists looked back Wow. And called sixty thousand of these babies who were born just at the end of the sugar ration or just after.

And they wanted to see, did this small, very precise change have any impact on their health? What do you think happened?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Obviously, it did.

Jessie Inchauspé
So the babies who were developing in the womb during the sugar ration had fifteen percent less lifetime risk of diabetes compared to their peers who were born just after the ration ended, so when moms who ate more sugar. So just by reducing your sugar intake by 40 grams, you can be protecting your child from diabetes.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Huge.

Jessie Inchauspé
Because what happens in the womb really sets you up for life. It's it's the moment where your organs are being created. Your metabolism is finding its set point. And something really interesting from the research, Mark, is I started to understand that the food you eat when you're pregnant sort of sends a sort of, like, postcard to your baby telling him what world he's gonna be born into. So if you're eating a lot of sugar, your baby's thinking, oh, man.

I'm gonna be born into a world with so much sugar. I have to prepare my body for this. So insulin goes up, fat storage goes up, and you're priming your baby from birth to be more likely to get the sugar driven diseases. It's wild.

Dr. Mark Hyman
But you also say in your book that it's not just diabetes or obesity that you're gonna get or heart disease, that that the high amounts of sugar lead to neurodevelopmental issues.

Jessie Inchauspé
Okay. So that's a

Dr. Mark Hyman
big one. Brain development and cause more inflammation in the brain

Jessie Inchauspé
Let's talk about that.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And can lead to autism and ADD.

Jessie Inchauspé
Well, is associated with it. In your womb, your baby's developing all of his neurons in his brain cells. And there are these tiny little cells called microglia, which are in the baby's brain, and they're sort of like the rangers. They're patrolling. Oh, is this neuron developing properly?

Is this one not okay? I need to go and kill that neuron because it's it's not doing okay. These are immune system cells that are patrolling, surveying, and pruning your baby's brain as it develops. Now when you have high glucose levels as a mom, your baby also has high glucose levels, that leads to inflammation. And scientists believe that high inflammation in the womb makes these microglia a little bit overactive because they they respond to inflammation.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So they Glia are your your brain's immune system.

Jessie Inchauspé
Exactly. So they start essentially pruning neurons they shouldn't be pruning. And this is why scientists believe this is the leading sort of theory behind why we see that moms with gestational diabetes are slightly more likely to have a baby who has autism. So if we look at millions of mom baby pairs, we see that on average, if you've had gestational diabetes, your baby has a twenty five percent higher likelihood of developing autism. Now I wanna be very cautious here.

I'm not saying that the diabetes is causing the autism.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It's association.

Jessie Inchauspé
Association. And the

Dr. Mark Hyman
overall one. What was the

Jessie Inchauspé
The overall risk is still low. So What was that? In a hundred to four in a hundred. That that's the overall prevalence. Right?

So it's it's twenty five percent increase. And so if you have diabetes in moms with diabetes, four in a hundred kids have autism versus in moms without diabetes, three in a hundred kids have autism. There's there's signal there. It's it's not necessarily causing it, but we know that high inflammation in the womb is not good news for your baby's brain.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean, you're and just to put it in plain English, like, if you eat a lot of sugar when you're pregnant, your baby's gonna have high risk of obesity, diabetes, and heart attacks

Jessie Inchauspé
Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And maybe even neurodevelopmental issues and many other things. So really important. And you're you're the glucose goddess. You you teach women how to eat sugar the right way.

Jessie Inchauspé
In a way that in a way that doesn't create more cravings and in a way that creates fewer glucose spikes. So it's protective for your baby also.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean, this is something called the glycemic load of a meal, which is essentially the way in which a meal in total affects your blood sugar. So for example, I always make the joke, if you put like, you know, three tablespoons of Metamucil in a can of Coke, it's gonna not affect your blood sugars because you got all the fiber, it's gonna swell up, but the sugar won't be absorbed as fast. So the matrix of your meal matters. Protein, fats, sugar. If you eat protein and fat, you're gonna slow the absorption, you're gonna mitigate the rise in blood sugar.

You're going to mitigate the rise in insulin.

Jessie Inchauspé
And the inflammation.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. The inflammation. So not that you can eat huge amounts, but it's not like don't eat anything. Right? So talk about how what are the simple steps?

And you've you've written about this in your other books, but I think it's important because if if just for everybody and also especially for pregnant women, what are the what are the, like, simple steps and hacks that you can use so that you keep your blood sugar more even and balanced? And now we have these amazing glucose monitors, which really almost didn't really exist even on a widespread level when you sort of we started talking years ago, and now people are like, see. Yes. I mean, I I just as an anecdote, I gotta go ghost monitor. I wanna try it out.

It was kinda like, I don't know, three years ago or something. And and I was at my friend's house with the summer, and he or he's like a food fanatic. He just only is perfectly clean, regenerative, organic, no sugar, nothing. And he ordered this incredible meal from this farm in Martha's Vineyard. It was like lamb and veggies and and we just gorged ourselves.

Like, we both had the blood sugar monitor on. We didn't eat bad things, we just ate a lot of things. We're stuffed. And I do that occasionally, but not too often. And we both called each other like at, you know, 09:00 at night and said, what's going on?

Our blood sugar's like a 160, which is crazy because both of us are thin. We're fit. And so it's not just the what you're eating. It's also the volume can Yeah. Can be a thing too with blood sugar and so so.

Jessie Inchauspé
Well, if you eat, like, you know, 10 pounds of sweet potatoes, sweet potatoes are fine for you, but that's gonna be a big glucose load anyway.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Exactly. Right.

Jessie Inchauspé
Okay. So first thing we already mentioned, protein rich breakfast, super important because it sets your glucose levels for the day. Second thing

Dr. Mark Hyman
Wait. What is protein rich breakfast?

Jessie Inchauspé
Okay. So a breakfast built around protein. So good protein sources are, well, eggs. We talked about it. It can be some full fat dairy.

It can be some leftover meat or fish from the night before. Crack it in the pan. Mhmm. You can use protein powder unsweetened if you wanna make a smoothie, for example. You just wanna make sure there's always a protein source.

And honestly, for me, it's eggs or dairy. That's my favorite go to in the morning.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Jessie Inchauspé
I also like leftovers from dinner. It's an easy way to get some animal protein.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And you could, like, have, you know, full fat Greek yogurt, which has more protein, and you can add nuts. Yes. Walnuts, almonds, pumpkin seeds, whatever.

Jessie Inchauspé
And some berry.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And some berry. So the more nuts you eat, and, you know, the more thick the yogurt is, the Greek yogurt has higher protein. So that's that's important to know.

Jessie Inchauspé
And a key thing for breakfast also is to avoid anything sweet, except whole fruit, if you want, for taste. Right? But the base should be really the protein and the healthy fat.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And more French toast.

Jessie Inchauspé
For dessert, Mark. You can have that for dessert. That's another hack. So if you wanna eat something sweet if you wanna eat something sweet, have it for dessert.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Is French toast French? No. Okay. Because you're from France. I'm like Well,

Jessie Inchauspé
it's I mean, yes. We have a French version of it. I don't know if it was invented in France. Okay. Did Americans just call it French toast?

Maybe. Because we don't call it French toast.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And you probably don't call French fries french fries either.

Jessie Inchauspé
No. You know what we call French toast?

Dr. Mark Hyman
We call it fries.

Jessie Inchauspé
American fries. We call it which means lost bread, and I think maybe it is French. I think we use sort of old bread. Yeah. So lost bread.

So French toast or anything sweet, have it for dessert after a meal.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Okay.

Jessie Inchauspé
At any point. Even if you're pregnant and you want a doughnut, have it after your lunch or after your dinner, not on an empty stomach.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Jessie Inchauspé
That's gonna reduce the glucose spike for you and your baby.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Okay.

Jessie Inchauspé
So that's helpful. Move after eating. After that big feast, if you had gone for an one hour walk, you would have seen a much smaller spike.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Even twenty minutes.

Jessie Inchauspé
Even twenty minutes. Yeah. Even doing 50 squats in the living room for fun would have helped because as you move, your muscles absorb some of the glucose you just ate.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm.

Jessie Inchauspé
So you should have, thought about that, Mark. Not very glucose goddess of you.

Dr. Mark Hyman
No. I was just so stuffed. I was like a stuffed pig and just seemed to like

Jessie Inchauspé
Well, if you're very stuffed, I have a trick. So you can do you can do calf raises. So if you were really stuffed after the meal on your couch, just do little calf push ups. You know what I mean? Yeah.

You go up and down on the balls of your feet like this, and your calf muscle will soak up glucose that you just ate. Think about me next time.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Should I do finger push ups?

Jessie Inchauspé
Yes. So this is something that Mark Hyman just invented everybody. Finger push ups, very effective for glucose spikes. You heard it here first. Another one.

Okay. Put clothing on your carbs. So that means never eat your carbs naked. So if you want bread or pasta or rice or a cookie, don't have them naked. Add some protein.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Cheese on a bread.

Jessie Inchauspé
Yeah. Like cheese on bread. Like almonds with your cookie. Like a Greek yogurt with the donut. Like chicken with your pasta.

Always add clothing.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. We're not recommending doughnuts here, folks.

Jessie Inchauspé
Just No. But you know what

Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean. I get the message.

Jessie Inchauspé
Listen. If you're gonna eat the doughnut, have some almonds with So those are some core hacks that you can use anytime.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I think that's important. Put clothing on your carbs, meaning don't eat them alone.

Jessie Inchauspé
It's the Metamucil and the Coca Cola. That's what you're doing. You're putting clothing on the Coke. And one more thing I would say is try to start your meals with vegetables because studies show that if you eat the vegetables first at the beginning of your meal, you're creating this sort of protective mesh in your intestine that slows down how quickly the glucose from carbs Fibr. The bloodstream.

Yes. Fiber. Exactly.

Dr. Mark Hyman
There's some interesting studies on wine. And, you know, and and and eating when you eat what in a meal, and what that does to your weight and metabolism, and, you know, and everybody knows that if you if you are hungry, and you have a glass of alcohol or wine or whatever, you'll feel a buzz. But if you wait till halfway through the meal and then you have the same amount of wine, you don't get the the rapidity of this buzz, and you don't get the same spike. So that's the idea. You're just trying to lower the glucose spike.

Jessie Inchauspé
Yes. Exactly. You're just trying to lower the spike. And so if you fill your stomach with fiber at the beginning of your meal, you can eat the same pizza or pasta afterwards, but it's gonna arrive more slowly into your bloodstream, therefore, a smaller spike. Therefore, you get a smaller crash, so not more cravings.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Jessie Inchauspé
So you don't have to get rid of all the carbs you eat. But if you eat them in the right order, time, combination, you're not gonna kick off a cravings roller coaster because that's what I used to be on. I would have sugar in the morning, and then at 10AM, at noon, at two, at four, at six, at 8PM, I wanted more sugar. I was on a big roller

Dr. Mark Hyman
coaster. I think that's such an important thing that you just mentioned is the cravings. Because a lot of people believe that this is just who they are. I'm just like a sugar addict, and I can't stop these cravings, and there's nothing I can do about it. I remember once teaching a workshop, and it it was on ultra metabolism, one of my first books, and it was really about like balancing your blood sugar.

And we had a very specific diet we had for them, and we had protein shakes, and we had green juices that were not sugary, and broth, and all that stuff. And and this woman says, look, I'm gonna try to do the program, but there's no way. I'm like 50 years old, this has been my whole life, I've never been able to not have cravings. I'm gonna try my best, but like, I'm just telling you it's not gonna work. Literally, like, the next day, she's like, this is amazing.

I don't have any cravings. And I'm like, it it's not that hard. It's like a day or two, and you sometimes will go through withdrawal depending on how much you're eating. But you you literally can break the cycle if you eat the way you're talking.

Jessie Inchauspé
And it wasn't she was not somebody with cravings. The cravings were a symptom. I like to think of symptoms as messages. I like to think of symptoms as your body being like, hey. Please, Jesse, stop with the sugary breakfast.

You

Dr. Mark Hyman
know? Right.

Jessie Inchauspé
Those cravings were her body saying to her, you need to balance your blood sugar.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Okay. So we did blood sugar. We did choline.

Jessie Inchauspé
Let's talk about you choose. We can do protein or omega threes.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Let's do protein. Because protein is like, you know, the new dietary guidelines just came out, and one of the big recommendations was eat protein, increase protein recommendations. And there's a lot of fast food companies that are just putting protein in foods like we put, you know, fiber or whatever. And tell us about protein.

Jessie Inchauspé
So when you're building a baby, you're building a human body from scratch. Mhmm. And the human body is very high in protein. So protein is not just muscles. People think protein is just muscles and body building.

So many things in your body are protein. The the collagen in your skin is a protein. Insulin, the hormones that the hormone that keeps your blood sugar steady is a protein. Your immune system is made of proteins. So proteins are key.

And by the time your baby's born, if you exclude water, he's 50% protein. 50% protein. So you need to eat protein to build that protein in your uterus. So naturally, the amount of protein in your diet should increase. But this is not something that pregnant moms are told.

And there's new studies. The fancy word for them is the indicator amino acid acid oxidation method. This is a fancy word to say we now have better tools to understand how much protein you need to eat when you're pregnant,

Dr. Mark Hyman
and it's

Jessie Inchauspé
more than we previously thought.

Dr. Mark Hyman
What's the amount?

Jessie Inchauspé
Is there So first trimester, one point two minimum grams per kilo per per day. Second and third trimester, one point five grams per kilo, and breastfeeding, 1.9.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. And that and that, by the way, mirrors the new dietary guidelines, which is 1.2 to 1.6.

Jessie Inchauspé
Yeah. Yeah. And during pregnancy, you have to be cautious and really consciously think, okay. I need to be getting more protein. And, also, what's tough is that as pregnancy goes on, you have less space in your stomach.

Your stomach gets smaller, so it's harder to eat bigger quantities. So you kinda have to focus almost entirely on protein. That should be the main thing around which you're building your diet because that's the most important thing for your baby and for you. Mhmm. So increase the amount of protein that you eat.

In animal studies, again, we can do many studies in animals around pregnancy, not so many in moms as you can imagine because we can't, you know, manipulate pregnant moms and see what happens. But in animals, what they find is that, again, having to do with epigenetics, if a mom has low protein intake during pregnancy, her baby is epigenetically programmed to have lower muscle mass.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Wow.

Jessie Inchauspé
Yeah. It makes sense. The baby's receiving not that much protein, so his body setting is like, we're not gonna be born into a world with a lot of protein. I should keep my muscles small. Prioritize essential organs.

And we have dozens of year decades of years of research on animals. When you reduce protein in the mom, the baby is born smaller with less muscle mass and a higher likelihood of disease later in life.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Wow.

Jessie Inchauspé
Protein is key. And it's especially in these studies, if you keep calories adequate and you just reduce protein, this still happens. It's not a it's not about not eating enough. It's about not eating enough protein. Yeah.

And today, 70% on average of moms are not hitting the minimum protein requirements during

Dr. Mark Hyman
the course. Seventy percent. I mean, there's such a protein debate in this country right now because the new dietary guidelines came out, and there's a whole group that are saying we don't need that much protein. The previous recommendations were point eight grams per kilo. This is too much.

There's no way we can feed the world with this. I mean, there's a lot of criticisms. And, you know, point eight grams per kilo was the amount to prevent protein deficiency.

Jessie Inchauspé
Exactly.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So it's how much vitamin c do you need to not get scurvy?

Jessie Inchauspé
Exactly.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It's like sixty milligrams. You know, how much vitamin d do you need to not get rickets? Maybe thirty units. Or how much vitamin d do you need to not get osteoporosis? Maybe five thousand units.

Jessie Inchauspé
Right? And for water, could be the same. Right? Like, maybe one glass of water is enough to not die, but everybody knows you should be eating more than drinking more than one glass of water a day. It's kind the same concept.

Yeah. So we need protein during pregnancy because we're building another body.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So what does that look like?

Jessie Inchauspé
So listen. For me, that worked out to about a 100 grams of protein a day minimum. So I would have four eggs in the morning, which is 30 grams, and then I would just have protein at every snack and every meal. I built it all around protein. I have recipes in my book of all the stuff I ate.

I was making this, like, supercharged snack almost every day. It was a skewer yogurt, which is higher in protein, plus two scoops of grass fed whey. So that snack was about 80 grams of protein, and I was putting passion fruit and berries and sea salt and tahini and peanut butter. I I had that every single day. The recipe's in my

Dr. Mark Hyman
book. Good.

Jessie Inchauspé
But 80 grams of protein right there.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I'm not pregnant, I'm gonna eat that.

Jessie Inchauspé
Yeah. Exactly. I'll send you the recipe. You could be pregnant. Who knows?

I'm kidding. So, yeah, that was a great that was a great snack. So just make sure you're eating enough protein, and you kinda have to spend time to measure how much you're eating. So in the book, I have a big table where you can note what you're eating and kinda see where you fall.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Four ounces of chicken is 30 grams. Four ounces of meat is 30 grams. Six ounces of fish is 30 grams. And protein powder, like, whey protein is great if you're it's it's an incredibly good thing. I use go whey or regeneratively raise weight.

I mean, it's know, you wanna get clean stuff that's not full of crap.

Jessie Inchauspé
And just remember the amount of protein you eat is sending a message to your baby. Yeah. So it's important to give him enough because otherwise, things shift. You know? Your DNA the your baby's DNA might have a plan, but then depending on the amount of protein available, that plan changes and adapts, and it can have lifelong ripples.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So why why is it important then for people to have higher muscle mass?

Jessie Inchauspé
Oh, because muscle is the organ of longevity. Because having a lower muscle mass is linked to a higher risk of all cause dis of all cause mortality. Muscle mass is not only a sink for excess glucose levels. It's also a beautiful metabolic organ that keeps you healthy, that keeps you vibrant and alive. It's very, very key.

And it also prevents, you know, long term frailty, breaking bones, which are a big risk factor when you get older.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I agree. In my book, Young Forever, I call it the currency of longevity.

Jessie Inchauspé
I like that.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I personally was a yoga teacher. I ran five miles a day. You know, I rode my bike. I you know, I'd always exercised for the last fifty plus years. But I hated the idea of gym.

I when I was 50, I couldn't do 10 push ups. I didn't I was intimidated because I was kinda skinny and tall, and I I didn't like to go to the gym with all these guys with giant muscles. And I smelled, it was like, I don't know. I didn't

Jessie Inchauspé
like it. Sounds great.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And I thought it was just for meatheads, and I had so much judgment about it. And then I decided I better get my act together because I was telling all my patients to do this. So at 59, I started working with a trainer, and started and I I can show you pictures after, but like I I had a picture of you when I was 26, and now when I'm 66, it's like a different body. And and I and I didn't think I could do it at this age. But at any age, you can start to do this.

There's a book I gave my mom, she got very mad at me for her sixtieth birthday, it's called Growing Old is Not for Sissies. And it's all about these elder athletes, because she her thing was basically she would say, every time I have the urge to exercise, I lie down till it goes away. So and she suffered from it. She lost so much muscle. She was so frail.

She got osteoporosis when she was older. She I mean, she it was horror. It was her frailty and lack of fitness that killed her. It's so important. And what you're saying, and this was really, I didn't even know this data, that that you're saying is that the protein that the mother eats during pregnancy determines the limit of the muscle that the child can build when they get older.

Jessie Inchauspé
And you see this. Right? You might have two friends, and they have the exact same workout routine. They both lift the same amount of weights, but one builds muscle easily and the other one doesn't.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Jessie Inchauspé
So there's many reasons for this, but what was taking place in the mother's womb during pregnancy could be a factor in determining your epigenetic ability to put on muscle. This blew my mind when I saw it because imagine the ripple effect. You know? Imagine how much better life is if you can build a lot of muscle that protects you. Yeah.

So that's protein. It's really important. It's really key. And I don't think people talk about this enough. So as a pregnant mom, really, protein should be one of your main focuses.

And then the fourth pillar is omega threes. I know you love omega threes. So DHA is an omega three fat that builds your baby's brain as well with choline. And in particular, what DHA does is that it helps guide the long arms of the brain cells that go and connect with each other. So it's really, really cool.

And in in lab experiments, you see that if you're trying to grow neurons in a in a petri dish, you have to add DHA. Otherwise, they don't connect with each other. And DHA is a fat that is made by microalgae in the ocean.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's right.

Jessie Inchauspé
And then it's eaten by fish, and it goes up the food chain. And us as humans, the way that we have it is by eating fatty oily fish. So salmon, anchovies, mackerel, sardines, etcetera.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Herring.

Jessie Inchauspé
Yeah. Herring. The recommendation is three hundred milligrams per day, which kinda works out to fish twice a week. Now, again, kinda like choline, you have the bare minimum recommendation, but studies show that having more than that could be even more beneficial for babies.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I mean, it's kinda crazy. If you look at the data, sixty sixty eight percent of US adults have, like, deficiencies in vitamin D, and ninety five percent have suboptimal levels. Ninety five percent. That's a huge number of Americans.

So think of the amount of women who are pregnant who have low levels of omega three fats, and it determines neurologic development, cognitive function, risk for neurodevelopmental disorders, for metabolic health. It's so important.

Jessie Inchauspé
It's so important for

Dr. Mark Hyman
the And part of the problem is, you know, omega threes were everywhere. That's why humans had them. They were in all the wild plants, they were in all the wild animals we ate, all the wild fish. You know, if you eat a, you know, a deer or elk or bison that's wild, it's gonna have a higher concentration of omega threes. Obviously, fish.

It used to be the it was such a valued currency. I don't if you know this, but in the Northwest, the Pacific Northwest, the Native Americans used these extremely oily fish. Forget what they were called, but they were like they were like money. They were so valuable. I don't think they knew about omega threes back then, but they just knew that it was such an important source of fat and food.

Jessie Inchauspé
And it builds the brain. And in studies, when you supplement moms with about a gram and a half of DHA per day, scientists can measure a four point increase in the IQ of the baby at four years old.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It's huge.

Jessie Inchauspé
Can you imagine?

Dr. Mark Hyman
And in in Europe, you probably know this, but the formulas have DHA. In America.

Jessie Inchauspé
It's not mandatory.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It's not mandatory. And and very few companies have it, and there's a few who do. And I just interviewed a woman who started a a formula company, part of the podcast. Bobbi is the name of the company, and it has DHA in it.

Jessie Inchauspé
So why is it in formula, but nobody's telling pregnant moms to also take it?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, it's not mostly here. It hasn't been

Jessie Inchauspé
for years. Well, it's getting into formula in Europe. Even in Europe, you know, I my whole pregnancy was in France where DHA is in baby formula. Right. But nobody told me to take it during pregnancy

Dr. Mark Hyman
Right.

Jessie Inchauspé
Which is even more important than during breastfeeding and formula. So it's wild. And, also, there's another piece of information that's worth mentioning is that since the eighties, the rates of preterm birth, so baby being born too early, has gone up 30 in The US. Thirty percent higher than in 1980. Babies being born preterm.

And one of the main links is the increase in omega six inflammatory fats and the decrease in omega three fat consumption. And in fact, and this is well established, when you supplement with omega threes, you reduce the risk of preterm birth. So all moms should be eating enough fish and also probably supplementing to make sure that they're getting enough for their baby because the recommendation of fish twice a week doesn't significantly increase the amount of omega threes in your cells. Like, really, should be having more than that, like at least a gram.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean, part of the problem is that, you know, fish is really healthy until humans came along and poisoned the oceans through coal and burning of coal, which releases lead and mercury and other toxins. And then you get that in the oceans, sort of acid rain, it's metal rain, goes in the oceans, and the algae absorb it. Then the little fish eat the algae, and the bigger fish, the little fish, and the the bigger bigger fish eat the bigger fish, and go all the way up to the sharks, the swordfish, and the tunas, which are laden with mercury.

Jessie Inchauspé
Yes. However And

Dr. Mark Hyman
they're also extremely high in omega threes. So Yes. That's the problem.

Jessie Inchauspé
Well, it's actually not I don't think it's that big of a problem because in the studies, you see that during pregnancy, but also anytime, the benefits of eating fish that are high in omega threes outweigh the downsides of the heavy metals. Like, it's better to eat fish to get omega threes than to not eat them even though today they're not as healthy as these.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I would agree. Just don't eat fish that eat other fish. Like, eat the little fish. Anchovies Sardines. Sardines, herring, mackerel, those are the best.

Even wild salmon, if eating small salmon, it can be okay. But even grass fed like, we usually everything it kinda makes me crazy. Everything we used was organic. Everything was grass fed. Like, there wasn't anything else.

Right? Everything was a pasture raised chicken. It didn't we just it was just normal. Right? When my grandparents, you know, were alive, that's what they ate.

And and if you have grass fed butter, you get pretty good levels of omega threes.

Jessie Inchauspé
Yeah. But not as much as you get in fish. Like, fish is

Dr. Mark Hyman
For sure.

Jessie Inchauspé
For sure. Even farmed fish today, Mark. Like, they even supplement the fish with did you say algae or algae in English?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Both. Okay. Tomato. Okay.

Jessie Inchauspé
Cool. So they even supplement the farmed fish with algae oil to make sure they have high omega three Yeah. Levels. So even if the only thing you can get is farmed fish, it's still gonna be beneficial.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Absolutely. But So

Jessie Inchauspé
I did fish three times a week, plus I supplemented with omega threes. And the omega three supplementation world is a whole other can of worms because you have to make sure it's, like, low in toxicity, etcetera. So in my book, I explain how to find one.

Dr. Mark Hyman
How to find a good one. Yeah. Exactly. But I do I do think most women should take an omega three supplement. I do think they should take a vitamin D supplement.

They definitely need, obviously, a prenatal with the right types of folate.

Jessie Inchauspé
Exactly.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And they all so I probably need, you know, atida dot high in choline, like you said, but I don't know if is it bad to supplement choline?

Jessie Inchauspé
No. It's not bad. I did, actually. My prenatal contained choline. But nonetheless, you can't get everything you need from supplements.

Like, you need to also make sure that you're getting it from food because just the the format of the molecules is better absorbed by you and your baby. But the supplements are an insurance policy. You need to make sure that your diet is also containing all this important stuff. You can't supplement yourself out of a bad diet. You can't just eat, you know, McDonald's every day and be like, it's okay.

I'm taking supplements.

Dr. Mark Hyman
No. You can't. You know, people do that or like, the same thing with statins. Oh, I can take you, you know, whatever I want. I'm taking a statin, know.

Doesn't work like that. So your your book really lays out these principles. It gives people practical suggestions of how to do this, recipes that are delicious, and it it doesn't guilt trip women, but it just educates them about what to do to actually help take care of their own bodies. And by the way, the diet you're eating is not just good for your baby. It's good for you too.

Jessie Inchauspé
I felt great during pregnancy because I ate better during pregnancy than any other time, to

Dr. Mark Hyman
be honest. Weight did you gain?

Jessie Inchauspé
Eleven kilos?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Twenty two pounds. Yeah. Ish. That's normal. Yeah.

Twenty five pounds. The baby's, like, six, seven pounds. Like, you don't mean you got a placenta, you got fluid, you got other stuff. But, you know, some of those women get forty, 50, 60, seventy, eighty, a hundred pounds, and they don't like, there's a cultural framework that that's okay because you're pregnant. And I think it's really a mistake.

Jessie Inchauspé
Some of my friends were like, oh, when I was pregnant, I was gonna be fat anyway, so I just ate everything I could never eat otherwise. And I was like, this actually is really not a good idea for your baby. But we have so many myths, and moms are not told about this stuff. And I think on the topic of guilt, it's important because as I was sharing this information on Instagram, I got a few DMs from moms like, oh, I feel guilty now. I'm like, listen.

My opinion on this is that when you're pregnant, you're gonna feel a sense of responsibility. There's pressure. You're building another human. Like, it's complicated. You might feel stressed.

You might feel overwhelmed. I don't think we can take that away, but what's nine months that count forever, the book is trying to do is help you navigate the pressure in a healthier way. So, you know, if you do these four things, you're really setting up your baby with a good a good base.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And it's simple. It's really simple. Yeah. Really simple. Balance your blood sugar.

Eat more protein. Choline, food, DHA.

Jessie Inchauspé
Yeah. Exactly.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Pretty simple.

Jessie Inchauspé
Pretty simple. And I hope that this book becomes completely irrelevant very fast. Like, I hope everybody gets this. All doctors start talking about it, and this book is not useful anymore.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. No. I'm so glad you wrote it because, you know, as I said, I delivered 500 babies.

Jessie Inchauspé
Can you talk about that a little bit? Like, I want to know more about that.

Dr. Mark Hyman
About what?

Jessie Inchauspé
How did you delivering 500 babies.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It was amazing. I mean, I was a family doctor. I got trained in a community hospital in Northern California where there was only family doctors. I learned to do c sections. And then after my and I actually was really interested in being in in an internship.

I went to this small town in Sault Ste. Marie, Canada. No. Somewhere. Don't even know where I was.

I didn't remember that. It a little town, and it was twenty four seven. I lived in the hospital and just I basically barely slept and just delivered babies nonstop for a month. And then and then I went to work in a small town in Idaho called Orphina, which nobody had ever heard of. A logging town with 3,500 people, no stoplights, and not even a McDonald's, or any kind of any kind of a chain of any sort.

And there was five family doctors and one drunk surgeon. I was probably most highly trained in obstetrics and also in c sections. I was a c section guy. So I had to cover all my own patients, and I to cover their patients. And so I was exhausted after four years, but it was an amazing experience.

I mean, delivering babies is just one of the highlights of my whole career. I mean, it's such a joy, and and I was very deliberate with my pregnant women about how to stay healthy and So you

Jessie Inchauspé
talked them them about about it? It?

Dr. Mark Hyman
A 100%. I didn't even know what I know now, but I I studied nutrition in college. I was always a healthy eater. I I really, you know, studied a lot about about this just out of my own interest before medical school. And I actually took nutrition at Cornell.

So I was really very aware of it. Know, it was one of the highlights of my career. I was so frustrated that people just didn't understand this. Then they didn't understand how important it was to regulate their biology in a way that you're you're in a you have a sacred duty here to create a little human. And how do you create a healthy little human?

And that's what we're talking about here. How do you how do you give your baby the best chance at a good and healthy life? How do you not program it by eating the wrong things, or by not eating the right things?

Jessie Inchauspé
Yeah. It's about vulnerability.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. And this whole the field of epigenetic research is so important. So I think I think people are starting to become aware of it, but you're literally writing in the the genetic expression software.

Jessie Inchauspé
You're the great programmer of the baby's DNA.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's right.

Jessie Inchauspé
Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. So you can

Jessie Inchauspé
firmly It's part of responsibility.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It kinda is. And I'm so I'm like daughter just like I'm like, she just recently became pregnant. So I'm like, oh god, what is she doing? She's she's exhausted.

She's an orthopedic surgery resident. She's working fourteen hours a day.

Jessie Inchauspé
You do what you do.

Dr. Mark Hyman
The hospital food is shit. You know? Like so I'm like, I can't get you meals.

Jessie Inchauspé
Well, any small step that you can take is gonna be beneficial. And also, you know, if you already had kids before or you're learning about this late in pregnancy, it's okay. Like, your baby will be okay. I was on the cusp of prediabetes at 25 years old even though I was eating pretty healthily, probably linked in some way to my mom's diet, but I was able to fend it off. You know, you're you're able to work with your epigenetic programming and your vulnerabilities.

But for my son, I was like, if I can set him up to not have pre be on the cusp of prediabetes at 25, I wanna do what I can to do that. So when you know more, you know, you change what you do. But just one part.

Dr. Mark Hyman
This is so great. So, Jesse, people can get your book anywhere nine months that count forever, how pregnancy diet shapes your baby's future. It's out now. And you also have written other books, The Glucose Goddess Method and The Glucose Revolution. Where can people find you and learn more about what you're doing?

Jessie Inchauspé
The best place is Instagram at Glucose Goddess. That's me.

Dr. Mark Hyman
At Glucose Goddess. Check it out.

Jessie Inchauspé
Thank you, Mark.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Thanks for being here. Thanks for coming all the way from France. Mhmm. Your baby, I hope, is somewhere close by.

Jessie Inchauspé
Yeah. Yeah. He's back in France. He's fine. No.

I'm kidding. I'm kidding. Can't believe it.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And and I wish you the best of luck, and thank you for raising the awareness around sugar. You know, I was beating that drug for a long time, but I wasn't as smart or as good as you at at it. Oh, stop it. So I thank you for doing the work and and getting this out there, really.

Jessie Inchauspé
Thank you, Mark. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure.

Dr. Mark Hyman
My my pleasure.

Dr. Mark Hyman
If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it. You can find me on all social media channels at Doctor Mark Hyman. Please reach out. I'd love to hear your comments and questions. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to The Doctor Hyman Show wherever you get your podcasts.

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