Dhru Purohit Show - Hacks to Balance Your Blood Sugar and Stop Cravings with Jessie Inchauspé

Episode Date: July 18, 2022

This episode is brought to you by InsideTracker and Gut Food. Most people don’t realize what kind of negative impact their favorite foods have on their blood sugar—and subsequently their entire body. The symptoms of blood sugar imbalances are everyday occurrences for most people—things like cravings, fatigue, acne, and moodiness—but they don’t have to be!  On today’s mini-episode, Dhru sits down with Jessie Inchauspé, also known as the “Glucose Goddess,” to talk all about simple, realistic actions we can take to balance our blood sugar throughout the day.  Jessie Inchauspé is on a mission to translate cutting-edge science into easy tips to help people improve their physical and mental health. She’s the founder of the wildly popular Instagram account @GlucoseGoddess, where she teaches life-changing food habits to hundreds of thousands of people. Jessie holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from King’s College London and a master’s degree in biochemistry from Georgetown University. Her work at a genetic analysis start-up in Silicon Valley made her realize that, as the key to good health, food habits beat genetics. In her first book, Glucose Revolution, Jessie shares her startling discovery about the essential role of blood sugar in every aspect of our lives, from cravings to fertility, and the surprising hacks to optimize it while still eating the foods we love. In this episode we dive into:   -Hacks to keep glucose levels steady throughout the day -What happens in your body when you have a large glucose spike -The long-term consequences of glucose spikes -Food sequencing to reduce a glucose spike  Listen to the full episode here. For more on Jessie Inchauspé, follow her on Instagram @glucosegoddess, Twitter @glucosegoddess, and through her website jessieinchauspe.com. Get her book, Glucose Revolution: The Life-Changing Power of Balancing Your Blood Sugar, here.  This episode is brought to you by InsideTracker and Gut Food. InsideTracker provides detailed nutrition and lifestyle guidance based on your individual needs. Right now, they’re offering my podcast community 20% off. Just go to insidetracker.com/DHRU to get your discount and try it out for yourself. Gut Food uses the power of three critical gut-supporting components—prebiotics, probiotics, and polyphenols—and five ingredients at clinically validated dosages to help reduce inflammation, support the growth of beneficial gut bacteria, improve digestion and reduce bloating, and support mood and energy. Check it out at gutfood.com. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi everyone, Drew Prode here. Today on our mini Monday episode, we have a fantastic excerpt from Jesse the glucose goddess, one of our most popular episodes of the year where she breaks down this important concept and theme of the power of keeping our blood sugar balance. Specifically, in today's mini episode, we're going to go into hacks to keep your glucose levels steady throughout the day. Jesse's going to talk about what happens in your body in the first place, when you have a large glucose spike. This is something that we want to minimize in our life. If it happens regularly and all the time, bad things happens. She breaks that down. She also chats about the long-term consequences of our glucose spikes, especially when it comes to chronic disease. And lastly, Jesse touches on food sequencing to reduce a glucose spike in your life.

If you care about your metabolic health and want practical, actionable steps on how to improve it, today's mini episode is for you. So I asked you in a little bit of chit-chat before this interview, if there was two hacks that you could share with our audience, that you found through your research in the space of how to help us avoid continuously spiking through the day when it comes to our blood sugar, what would two of those hacks end up being? I'd love to pass it over to you. The first one would be, Drew, next time you're about to sit down for a meal.

grab a tall glass of water. We're talking like a tall glass of water. And into the water, drip a little bit of vinegar. It can be any type of vinegar. It can be apple cider vinegar, white wine vinegar, rice vinegar, whatever. Just not balsamic vinegar. And drink it before the meal. We're talking one teaspoon to one tablespoon.

This will decrease the glucose spike of the meal you're about to eat by up to 30%. What does that mean? It means less inflammation from the meal. less weight gain from the meal, and most importantly, less cycle of cravings in the afternoon. You'll feel less tired after eating. You won't have that 3 p.m. like, who I want to eat a cookie kind of feeling. So it's incredibly powerful, incredibly scientifically validated, and incredibly simple. And one question on that before we go to hack number two, dripping in a little bit of vinegar.

I love apple cider vinegar in particular. How much are we talking about? tablespoon, teaspoon, teaspoon? The science shows us that the tablespoon is the better amount. However, if you're just starting out, I would start with a teaspoon just because it takes a little bit of while to get used to the taste and use a straw if you can to protect your teeth. It's an acquired taste, and at this point, I love the taste so much that I drink a whole

tablespoon like multiple times a day. But at the beginning, you know, you can start off a bit slowly because the taste is definitely different. And for people who do like the taste, like myself, is this something? You mentioned you do it multiple times a day. Is it something that you regularly do before the meals that you have? Yes. I do it before lunch and before dinner.

In the morning, not so much just because I don't feel like it. And you can really do it, I mean, up to five times a day if you want. There's no upper limit. There's just one study that shows that you should not drink more than 30 tablespoons of vinegar per day for more than two years in a row because that could cause some issues. But anything else diluted in water, totally safe, incredibly effective. And really, really cool. You know, one of the reasons that I love your new book and your Instagram page is like,

these little nuggets, you're constantly tossing them out. And that's why I wanted to start off the interview with some of these hacks that are there, because at the end of the day, we're all trying to feel better and everybody has limited time. But we're trying to live our best life and actually step into managing balanced blood sugar levels, which we've done so many conversations on, but I'm very interested in your unique take on it. So before we, again, get into all that, let's do the other hack that. there and if you could help us understand what it means to put clothes on your carbs. Isn't it obvious?

No, I'm just kidding. So putting clothes on your carbs is a very simple thing to remember to keep your glucose levels steady throughout the day. So anytime you're going to eat carbs, so we're talking starches or sugars, right? Make sure you don't eat them naked and by naked I mean on their own. So always put some clothes on your carbs. The clothes can be protein, fat, or fiber. So some examples.

You're going to have a slice of bread. Put some butter on it. Put some avocado on it. Put a slice of ham on it. You're going to eat a cookie. Put some Greek yogurt on it. Or some nuts. Something like that.

You're going to eat some pasta. Maybe make a little fish sauce and throw it on top, add some cheese. Just make sure the carbs you're eating do not go into your body on their own. Because if you add clothes to them, you're going to slow down this. the speed at which the carbs are going to be broken down into glucose molecules. So you're slowing down the speed at which the glucose is arriving into your bloodstream and you're avoiding this sharp increase that we call a glucose spike that carries with it so many harmful effects on our body.

So you can still eat the carbs. We're not talking about the only way to have balanced blood sugar levels is to not eat carbs. It's just these little tips like putting clothes on them that allow you to eat them while still having balanced glucose level. This episode is brought to you by Inside Tracker. You know, in my opinion, I think technology can be a critical part in the solution to helping us figure out what foods are best suited for our own unique genetic makeup. That's why I was super excited when I heard about Inside Tracker. Inside Tracker helps take the guesswork out of living optimally and creates a nutrition, exercise, and lifestyle plan that's personalized for you based on your blood work, DNA, and personal preferences.

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That's D-H-R-U to get your discount code and to try it out for yourself. That's InsideTracker.com slash dHRU for 20% off. Did you know that the health of your entire body is rooted in the the health of your gut. Hippocrates said this many, many years ago, disease begins in the gut, and so does health. Over the last decade, research on the importance of the gut microbiome has exploded, which led myself and my business partner, Dr. Mark Hyman, to ask the simple question, is there a way that we can create a daily support system for the individuals in our community to help them transform their gut for the better? Turns out there is. With the help of a few experts and years of research,

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and what we've been up to go to gutfood.com. That's g-ut-f-o-o-d-com to learn more. As we've talked about on this podcast before, you know, inflammation is great. It's this tool that is like so helpful for our body and our repair process. But what we're talking about is the chronic aspects of all of these, chronically spiking your blood sugar. You know, sometimes when people venture into the world of continuous glucose monitors, they start to think that they need to be balanced all the time. And really, that's not what we're shooting for. We're just trying to avoid the regular ups and downs.

It's actually, when we eat things, there should be a little bit of a, bump up, but we just don't want that huge delta and that delta to be happening throughout the day. Can you talk about that? Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, it's natural to eat things that turn into glucose in your body. Your body knows how to deal with small spikes. But this is what happens when you have a really big spike. So there are three main things that happen, and the third one is related to weight gain.

So I'll go through them so we can understand really what's happening in the body. And by the way, this is what I'm the most passionate about, like explaining to people really the inner working the biochemistry underneath your skin. I think it's amazing. So every time there's a glucose spike, glucose rushes to yourselves and it goes straight to the mitochondria because your mitochondria are the ones

that are in charge of turning glucose into energy. That's their job. They're really good at it. However, if you give you mitochondria too much glucose, they're actually not super happy about it. It becomes overwhelming for them. And they're like, oh, Drew, I can't handle all this glucose. I'm just going to shut you off, shut down, and they literally just shut off.

And this is a response to this huge influx of glucose that they cannot deal with. And as your mitochondria are shutting off, they're going to be releasing these little molecules called free radicals, which have large consequences on the body. Free radicals, anything they touch, they damage. So if they touch your DNA, they're going to make little mutations that could lead to cancer. if they touch the membrane of your cells, they're going to lead to little holes in it, which could, at the end of the day,

actually damage the structural integrity of your cells. And so your body is going to try to respond to these free radicals by increasing inflammation. If you're spiking all the time, inflammation is happening all the time, and chronic inflammation is the root cause of most diseases. Three out of five of people in the world are going to die of an inflammation-based disease.

So that's the first reason glucose spikes are not good for us. The second thing that happens when we spike, this blew my mind, Drew. Honestly, when I realize the connection between glucose spikes and wrinkles, which I'm going to explain, I was just like, okay, this is incredible. Everybody needs to know this. So when there's glucose in your body, it's just running around like a kid on the playground. I mean, glucose goes everywhere and it touches all the stuff that it finds. When glucose bumps into another molecule, any type of molecule, it actually slightly damages it. it does what's called glycation.

So it glycates other molecules. And when a molecule is glycated, it is damaged forever. Now, if glucose bumps into a molecule of collagen, for example, which is the protein you need to have nice skin and nails and hair, it damages the collagen. As a result, you get wrinkles. I mean, it's just, it's incredibly straightforward, the connection. Of course, you don't just get wrinkles, like a lot of other stuff.

happens in your body and glycation is actually the reason we end up dying glycation is like toasting like a piece of toast in the toaster that's glycation so that's the second thing that happens when we have glucose spikes and your body is trying to protect you against all this because your body knows that all these terrible things are happening so it has this very elegant solution anytime your glucose spikes your body releases insulin and insulin's job is to take glucose and put it the fuck away so that it doesn't lead to these harmful consequences in your body. So where does insulin put glucose away? In your liver, in your muscles, and then when those are full, it puts it away in your fat cells. So you gain weight. All this to say that weight gain

is actually a protection mechanism that your body has to protect you from glucose spikes. So when we put on wait, we should be saying, thanks, body, for protecting me against all that information and aging. Yeah, not to mention, you know, there's a whole history around and the evolutionary process of when we would have access to certain fruits that were in season, late summer, early fall, a lot of that was getting us ready to fatten up in the same way that bears eat a bunch of berries before they go into hibernate and gain like, you know, can gain like sometimes 200, 300 pounds before they go into hibernation is like, you know, eating these fruits and these other things that would help us spike our blood sugar on purpose would help us fatten up so that we could

survive, you know, winter. And there's a whole element of uric acid being connected into there and other stuff. And there's plenty of people that have written about that connection. So it's like our weight, as you said, is a protection mechanism. It's also an energy storage. It's like an extra charger that we have for our iPhone to make sure that it doesn't put out. The portable fridge. It's our own personal fridge. Right. But now, because we're spiking our glucose all the time, and that's really your central message.

This is happening all the time and the variability that's happening throughout the day, it's leading to a whole host of problems. Yes. And also keep in mind that there's actually different kinds of spikes. So if you're spiking from something starchy, it's just glucose that's causing these. issues because there's only glucose and starchy foods. If you're spiking from something sweet, so like candy, cookie, dessert, ice cream, there's also fructose in there. Fructose lives hand in hand as Dr. Lustig says, lives hand in hand with glucose in sweet foods. And fructose ages us, inflames us, and makes us put on fat at an even greater rate than glucose alone.

And that's why one of my hacks is, if you want a snack, if it's the middle, the day and you're just hungry, pick something savory, starchy, instead of something sweet. Because as a result, you're going to be helping your body not have all these consequences. And if you want to eat a sweet thing, have it as dessert after your next meal so that because of everything else in your stomach and intestine, your body's actually protected and it's going to absorb less of all that stuff. No, I love that. That's a whole section in your book, you know, pick dessert over a sweet snack.

Yeah. And I think that these little things, you know, hats off to you. you spent a lot of time on this book, these little quick little things that people remember, they may not understand all the mechanisms. The mechanisms are there for them to reference. The studies are there for them to reference. But they remember these little things like, okay, yeah, what did you say? Okay, put clothes on your carbs.

And if we can get that into the zeitgeist, if we can memeify it, which you've been doing a great job doing, these things now become the primary way, but they're actually backed up with evidence. because some of the ways, some of the ways of these memes and marketing things have gotten out there. And I'm going to talk about one that you've explored and chatted about. They've infiltrated society, but there may not be the evidence around them. So let's talk about one of them. Eating fruit on an empty stomach. So many people think that if you want to eat fruit, that the healthiest way to do that is eating fruit on an empty stomach.

What did you find out about that sort of meme that's been out there in the world for such a long time? and its origin stories. Yeah. So I did a lot of research on this because one of the hacks that I talk about, which is so cool, is that when you're having a meal, you should eat your food in a specific order

to reduce the glucose spike by up to 75%. And the correct order is veggies first, protein and fat second, starches and sugars last. And fruit fall in the sugars category because they have a lot of naturally occurring sugars in them. And so I started putting that out there and people were like,

but Jesse, what about that thing that you should never eat fruit after a meal, otherwise it's going to rot in your stomach and ferment and all these bad things are going to happen? So I was like, hey, I'm going to research this. I'm a scientist. I'm a researcher. So I was like, I don't know. I'm going to find out. It took me a little bit of time to understand where this came from, but I finally found the source. It was a doctor in the Renaissance who wrote this thing saying that you should never eat fruit after a meal, because otherwise it will send these putrid vapors and nauseous gases into your body leading to rotting and all this health damage. But this has no modern scientific support,

although Ayurvedic proponents actually also talk about this, that fruit should only be eaten on an empty stomach. So you're kind of balancing these things. You're balancing the fact that in modern scientific evidence. This is not a thing. And it actually turns out that from a glucose perspective, it's better to eat fruit at the end of the meal. And then you have these potential myths that we don't really know, you know, what the backing is for them. So I'm in the camp of follow the latest science, unless you personally feel that, you know, if you have fruit after a meal, something happens. Some people get some gas or bloating. But for most people, having fruit as dessert is totally fine. And if that's the case for you, definitely follow the latest cutting-edge

glucose science saying that fruit should be eaten less. So tell us what you found out about rice and whether or not there's a difference between white rice and brown rice. And then, if you could follow that up with, how can we enjoy rice in a little bit more of a responsible way that doesn't have our body, you know, constantly on that blood sugar roller coaster? Yeah. So there's this whole thing about whole grain rice, brown rice, and it's been marketed very heavily. And now we believe that anything that's whole grain or a little bit browner is automatically a health food.

So if you look in the supermarket, the white rice versus the brown rice, you think to yourself, okay, well, if I'm going to, I'm just going to pick the brown rice because it's going to be so much better for me. The white rice, horrible, horrible, horrible, brown rice, super good, super healthy. It turns out that I tested both white rice and brown rice. I ate the exact same quantity and the glucose spikes were virtually the same. And this is actually not that surprising when you look at the difference from a molecular level between white rice and brown rice. Brown rice has like a tiny bit more fiber, a tiny bit more protein than white rice, but it's still rice.

I mean, those two things are incredibly similar. If you actually want to make an impact on your glucose levels while eating rice, it is a million times, well, don't quote me on a million times, but much, much more powerful to put clothes on your rice than to change the color of the rice. So pick the rice color that you prefer. I prefer white rice, personally, and put some spinach in there, put some eggs, put a piece of fish, put some butter, some olive oil, some green peas, some sea salt and nice spices and just dress it into a meal that doesn't contain just starch.

And when you do that, I mean, then you actually flatten the glucose curve, and then you actually help your body. But just switching from right rice to brown rice or white pasta to brown pasta, no impact. Not to mention the fact that, you know, for generations, for thousands of years, why did all these societies go through all this hassle to de-husk rice? You know, brown rice is a more recent phenomenon. And from what I understand, it really started to emerge in the movement of like the macromyotic movement here in America. Not that people weren't eating wild rice and other components that were there, but in Asia, primarily India, China, Japan.

There was not as popularity around brown rice. And in fact, people knew that brown rice in particular could cause a little bit of gut irritation. Maybe it's the anti-nutrients inside of rice. Maybe it's the, you know, whatever it might be that's there. So that's another thing that I share is that there's so many people that are eating brown rice because they think it's healthy. But also, it could be causing some digestive upset. More importantly is that rice, just like sugar, which we'll get to in a second, it's all the same. Be careful.

Maybe don't have as much as rice if you were normally centering your entire two meals a day, single meal a day at dinner, which is very common in the Indian community. like my parents, before they wore their glucose monitors, would have rice a big bowl of rice every dinner. And now they put clothes on their rice and they just have minimized it. They can still enjoy the taste, but they're not having as big of a quantity. And they've both seen massive shifts in their blood sugar regulation throughout the day. That's great.

Another thing they could do is also eat the rice last. So if they still wanted that big bowl of rice, start the meal with a salad, like a whatever, a green salad with some fat and some protein in there, and then have the rice. Because what happens when you do that, when you start your meals with vegetables, and that's another one of my hacks, the fiber in the vegetables, when it lands in your stomach and your intestine, it actually coats the inside of your intestine with this cool mesh.

And the mesh prevents your body from absorbing too much of the glucose coming through afterwards. So they can still enjoy the bowl of rice, but with a much smaller glucose spike, because they're going to be absorbing less of the glucose molecules. I always love how you bring it back to that because the central messaging on behavior change is also when you tell people to not do something at all. There's a little bit of like that child in all of us is like, oh, you're going to tell me to not do something? F you, I'm going to go and go ahead and do it. I'm totally like that. I'm the worst at this. Well, it's good. It's good that you have that because you can also have that empathy for people who are just trying to go about their day.

They're trying to figure things out. They don't have all this time. and they don't even often have the finances right now because unless they're diabetic, their insurance is not going to cover a glucose monitor and it's expensive. They're just looking for these simple things that are there. And as we know, heading in the right direction is a big part of the process, especially when we start talking about accessibility. There's a whole group of people that don't listen to podcasts that are not going to pick up a book

and that are working two or three jobs a day just to survive. So if you can have these little things that you can share with them, these little gems, these little takeaways, it's going to make health way more available to a whole host of people that previously wouldn't have paid attention to that topic and are fighting against all the onslaught of marketing that's available. Let's talk about the right order when it comes to pasta. Pasta is a dish that a lot of people like. And you talked about the difference between pasta having it before having a certain veggie. I'll let you talk about that veggie versus having it after having that veggie. Can you break that one down? Yes.

And I love pasta. So when I first put on a glucose monitor and I was going through this whole process, I was like, I need to figure out how to eat pasta without a glucose spike because it's non-negotiable. I grew up eating so much pasta and parmesan. It's like I still eat parmesan every single day. I probably have eaten like 2,000 pounds of the thing now that I've been on this earth for 30 years, but I love pasta. So I had to figure out how to eat it.

Pasta is a starch. So if you eat it on its own, it's going to create a big glucose spike. What I devised was this very cool trick that actually merges two hacks. So before I have a big place of pasta, I will have a salad. So like green leaves, arugula, rocket, spinach. And then I would make a vinegar dressing on the pasta. And if I have the salad before the pasta, I'm able to lower the glucose spike. of the entire meal by 50%.

So we're talking, I just had the pasta that I love, but I'm cutting the glucose spike in half, which means half the amount of inflammation, half the amount of aging, half the amount of weight gain, half the amount of crazy

hormonal dysregulation and, you know, craving's appearance in the afternoon. So vegetables with vinegar before starches, super, super important. The fiber and the veggies coats your intestine, the vinegar in the veggies tells your muscles to absorb the glucose really quickly as it lands in your bloodstream, and as a result, you're able to enjoy the starches without so many consequences. However, if you have the pasta first and then you have the salad,

you don't see this big impact. The order of the food is important. It's important to eat the starches after the vegetables to get all these benefits. So put yourself in a typical situation where people are going out to dinner and a sequencing of sort of the bread, the appetizers, and the entrees that come in and dessert. Talk about the consequences of doing it in the typical way and contrast that with, and you write about this inside of your book, you know, you put people through these different scenarios, talk about that with the contrast of a different way that we could go about things to protect our body.

Typical thing, you sit down, you're starving. They serve you bread as you're looking through the menu. Typical thing, you reach for the bread and you eat a whole lot of bread. Now, what's happening is that the bread is landing in your stomach. There's nothing else in your system. Very quickly, it breaks down into glucose and ends up in your bloodstream. So before you've even started your meal, you're already starting to see this glucose spike. Then you eat your regular meal and maybe 45 minutes in, your glucose levels are starting to crash

from the bread that you ate first. As a result, the craving center in your brain activates. And it's like, Drew, you're super hungry, eat more. And then dessert time rolls around and they ask you if you want a dessert and you're like, oh my God, yes, I need a dessert, I need sugar, I need something sweet. that's because your glucose is dropping from that piece of bread that you had at the very beginning. Now, new way to go to the restaurant. Glucose goddess way of eating.

They serve the bread. You're like, that looks really tasty. I'm going to have it in five minutes. You order a vegetable-based starter. It can be anything. It can be beans. It can be sauerkrauts. It can be kimchi.

It can be broccoli, tomatoes, whatever. You have that first. then you have your main with the bread. And actually it's quite helpful because when you have the bread doing the main, you can actually use the bread to sauce everything, which I love doing. But most importantly, you're still eating the bread, but because of the fiber that's in there from the vegetable starter, you don't have this big glucose spike.

And as I mentioned in the beginning, when your glucose levels are steadier, your hunger hormones are steadier as well. So it's time for dessert, and you probably don't really crave anything sweet. So maybe you just split dessert with your friends instead of, like you needed an entire, you know, apple crumble to yourself. And so you're starting to feed your body in a way that makes it happier. You feel better mentally. You realize that it's not a willpower issue.

It's really just what you put in is actually going to make you feel a certain way. And if you eat to keep your glucose levels steady and balanced, you're going to feel amazing. It's going to feel like a superpower. Your body is going to become your friend and it's going to be a whole new world. That's it. You're unlocking a whole new world. We talked a lot about some of the shorter-term consequences of not having our glucose balance and our blood sugar balanced. I'd love to touch on some of the longer-term things that are there. I'll see these different posters sometimes that life is short, eat whatever you want.

Do the things that you want to do. And listen, I want people to eat whatever they want to eat. And I want people to just be happy. And if you're happy, amazing. And, you know, if we can reduce some human suffering along the way, that's a beautiful place. leave the world a better place than we came across this. What a lot of people don't understand is that it's not just about not having optimal focus. It's not just about not feeling your best.

It's not just about hunger and weight gain. There's other chronic diseases that are directly tied into irregular and crazy blood sugar. So let's talk about the first one. And this is laid out inside of your book. And that first one that I want to talk about is cancer. What do we know about cancer and its connection to blood glucose? The main connection we see here is that cancer is a disease that is linked to inflammation. And as I mentioned, every time a glucose spike happens in your body, you increase your inflammation levels.

So as a result, the terrain for cancer to grow is just much more fertile. Another thing I mentioned was the free radicals that your mitochondria release whenever there's a glucose spike. these free radicals, as I mentioned, anything they touch, they damage. If they touch your DNA, they damage it. And these damages can actually be the mutations that start the proliferation of cancer, that start those cells that are dividing endlessly and that create tumors. And, you know, in the studies it's very clear, you can see that people who eat in a way that spikes their glucose levels more have a higher risk of. of developing cancer.

And it's becoming, I mean, it's everywhere. I think the stat is one in three children born today are going to get cancer in their lifetime. It's everywhere. And it's very connected to our food. Now, obviously, there are other things that play, you know, for the development of cancer. You have the big ones like smoking, stress, lack of exercise. There's a lot, a lot of power in our plate.

And the issue with these chronic diseases is that you don't know you have them until you get diagnosed. And so often it's difficult to think, okay, I'm going to do these things to prevent diseases that I might not even get. But the cool thing about the glucose hacks is that they kill two birds with one stone. Not only are you going to feel better today because you're not going to have any more cravings, your skin is going to get better, your sleep is going to improve. but you're also helping long-term your body not develop cancer and other diseases. So it's really fundamental to today and tomorrow. What's crazy is that, you know, we live in a time where if somebody goes on WebMD and there's an article that was written, I think it was like six, seven years ago.

And WebMD tries to, you know, bust myths. And so one of the articles that was there was, does sugar cause cancer, right? Does sugar cause cancer? Now, there's no one thing that causes a cancer. There's a lot of play in. But inside of that article, one of the things that they were saying was that there's really not that understanding and connection between sugar and cancer. And I remember having one of the top researchers in the field of angiogenesis, Dr.

William Lee, on my podcast. And I asked him about that article and asked him to break it down. And he was saying that just because we don't yet fully understand the mechanism at the level of the doctor's office and public communication doesn't mean that there's not a connection with the root factors that are connected to that chronic disease. So yes, do we have a big double-blind placebo-control trial of sugar and cancer? No, but there's a ton of information talking about how cancer cells have more receptors for sugar than they do compared to healthier cells.

And that if we want to starve the cancer, one of the things we can do is, of course, fast. But another thing that we can do is cut off one of their food sources that is part of their growth, which is sugar. So what is required for us now, especially if we're all trying to be the CEO of our own health, is we have to be willing to start connecting the dots and understand that before somebody officially says, just like with smoking, we knew that there

was a connection between smoking and cancer for such a long time. But finally, when the government got around to stamping and saying, yes, we know, you know, smoking can cause cancer, we're now 30 years, you know, well beyond what the research has shown. A lot of people got sick. It's like, lot of people got sick. Don't turn skepticism into inaction. These things changing the way you eat to keep, for example, your glucose level steady or, you know, trying to reduce the amount of sugar in your diet, the impact is going to be positive. Like, there's, there are very few downsides to this. And so in my world, I would rather do these things to potentially have an amazing upside, knowing what I know about the biochemistry of our body

and not wait for that double-blind placebo-controlled trial to come out because also Drew, who's going to pay for that trial and who's going to authorize that trial? We're talking essentially to do it we would have to take two groups of people, one group feed them a sugar-based diet for 60 years, and the other group not, and then measure who gets cancer or not. I mean, that's never going to happen. It's just never going to happen.

That's so true. And we have to understand that especially when we're talking to our primary care provider is that in addition to the fact that many people know on this podcast, that physicians well-intentioned don't get a lot of education and nutrition are struggling with their own aspects of nutrition, weight gain, focus, addiction, all those components. There's another component which is once you are done medical school, your exposure to the literature is quite, It's quite limited unless it's a passion of yours. Yeah, you don't have time also. Being a doctor is very time consuming. Like, you don't have time to look at the latest literature. Yeah.

Right. So we kind of have to do a little bit of our own digging in addition to educating them along the way. If they're open to this process, you know, your book is a great resource. We recommend it other great books that are out there too. And understand that they don't have to be, they can be part of our team, but they're not the CEO of our team. You're the CEO of your team and you're the person that's in charge and health starts first with what you're doing at home with all the lifestyle factors including all the things that we're talking about with diet.