Dhru Purohit Show - Scientist Reveals What to Eat to Beat Inflammation, Balance Blood Sugar, and End Fatigue with Jessie Inchauspé

Episode Date: March 31, 2022

This episode is brought to you by Pendulum and WHOOP. 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!  Today on The Dhru Purohit Podcast, Dhru talks with Jessie Inchauspé, also known as the “Glucose Goddess,” all about simple, realistic actions we can take to balance our blood sugar throughout the day.    Jessie Inchauspé is the founder of the wildly popular Instagram account GlucoseGoddess, where she teaches life-changing food habits to hundreds of thousands of people. 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:  -Two hacks to keep glucose levels steady throughout the day (2:30) -Why it’s so important to flatten your glucose curve (12:40) -The connection between hunger, weight gain, and glucose levels (16:42) -The three things that happen in your body when you have a large glucose spike (22:47) -The connection between glucose and wrinkles (25:21) -Food sequencing to reduce a glucose spike (30:25) -How to eat rice and have a steady glucose response (48:27) -The right order to eat pasta (56:30) -The long-term consequences of glucose spikes (1:01:55) -Blood sugar, aging, and longevity (1:09:02) -How sleep impacts glucose response (1:18:50) -A day in the life of a glucose goddess (1:36:51)   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 Pendulum and WHOOP. Pendulum is the first company to figure out how to harness the amazing benefits of Akkermansia in a probiotic capsule. To receive 20% off your first purchase of Pendulum’s Akkermansia probiotic supplement, go to pendulumlife.com and use code DHRU20. WHOOP is a personalized digital fitness tracker and health-coaching platform that monitors your physiology 24/7 and provides personalized recommendations based on what your body needs. For me, it's been a game-changer to optimize my sleep and improve my fitness, performance, and overall health. To get yours, go to join.whoop.com and get 15% off your membership with code DHRU15. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Every day, the way you're eating and its impact on your glucose level is dictating how quickly you're aging. It's insane. Welcome to the Drew Proe podcast. Each week, we explore the inner workings of the brain and the body with one of the brightest minds in wellness, medicine, and mindset. This week's guest is Jesse Inchaospe, also known as the glucose goddess. And if you've ever been confused about the topic of metabolic health, if you've ever wanted to make and balancing your blood sugar, but so much of the advice out there feels restrictive and constraining. It doesn't allow you to enjoy the foods that you want to enjoy. Today's episode

is for you. A little bit about Jesse. Jesse is on a mission to translate cutting edge science into easy tips to help anyone improve their physical and mental health. And that's exactly what she does on today's episode. Now, if her handle, the glucose goddess sounds familiar, It's because it's a wildly popular Instagram account where Jesse teaches life-changing food habits to hundreds of thousands of people every single day. If you don't follow her, check her out because she posts these incredible graphics showing the response of different foods and what happens when you have those foods in the right order, which is a big part of today's theme. A little bit about her education background. She holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics from King's College, London, and a master of science degree in biofews. chemistry from Georgetown University. Now, Jesse has a new book coming out called The Glucose

Revolution. And in it, she has so many incredible and practical tips on how anybody, I really do mean anybody, can begin to hack their way into better blood sugar. If you're someone that's struggling with cravings, if you're someone that's struggling with energy dips throughout the day, if you're someone that's struggling with fertility, if you're someone that's struggling with erectile dysfunction, which many men are impacted by us. If you're someone that's struggling with acne and so many other chronic diseases of inflammation, so much of that comes back to blood sugar. And today's episode is going to help you unpack that all and learn how to step into your best health ever. So stay tuned for a fascinating podcast with Jesse in Chalbby. Jesse, welcome to the podcast.

I'm a big fan. I'm excited to jump right in by providing our audience with a little bit of value before we go into your origin stories and the book, which I'm super excited about. 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 see.

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. 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 levels. You know, there is a question that you open up the book with and something that you've asked yourself and that you ask your audience to ask themselves on a regular basis. And that question is, do you know what the last thing you ate did to your body and mind? Tell us about why this question is so important for our audience to be thinking about. Because we haven't been trained to do the detective work that allows us to understand, why do I feel so tired at 11? Why do I feel so hungry at 2 p.m.? Why am I craving this piece of

chocolate after dinner? Why am I having a hard time falling asleep? Why do I wake up feeling anxious? We don't really know where all this stuff comes from. And what I want people to understand is that very often the food you're eating is actually creating these sensations, these emotions in your body. But because, you know, food takes a few hours to get through your system, the effects take a little while to sort of happen, you're not really trained to know that the breakfast you just ate three hours ago is the reason you're feeling tired now. Now, if we lived in a world where if you ate a bowl of cereal, you instantly had a panic attack and fell asleep in your bowl, you would understand the connection. But because of this lagging time, we don't know it anymore. But what I'm trying to

teach people is to be able to analyze in a very simple and fun way how what they're eating is probably going to affect their physical and mental health in a couple hours, in a couple days, in a couple weeks, in a couple months. You know, the beautiful thing about that, and we often talk about it as like strengthening the connection between what you eat and how you feel is that so much of life stops being about willpower. You do it because you feel good. As an entrepreneur who's running, you know, multiple companies with over 60 employees, I know

that when I start my day off in a way that actually feels good to my body, I have more focus. I have more energy. I have the ability to concentrate and give love and attention to all the things that matter. I don't actually like thinking about health a lot, separate from our interviews and getting prepared for guests like yourself. I don't like to think about health when it comes to my own personal life. I like to do the things that are there that allow me to step into the best energy, focus, and mindset so I can get.

give that energy to everything else that's important in my life. You said something about willpower. I think it's such an interesting topic. Often when, for example, we have a craving for something sweet, we feel like, oh, I don't have enough willpower, like I need to fight through this. Like, I just need to be stronger and I'll be able to overcome these cravings. Actually, very often, if you're having a craving, it's because your glucose level is crashing because four hours ago you had a big spike from a meal.

Your cravings are not your fault. your cravings are literally your body's reaction to dropping glucose levels. And amazing studies have shown this, especially one at Yale in 2018, that kind of like opened this whole field. We now know that if you're having a craving, it's because of something you ate previously. So if you're able to eat in a way that keeps your glucose levels balanced, your cravings just disappear. It's not a willpower thing. It's as you said, setting your body up for success. And it starts in the morning, obviously. But the effect is so powerful.

Well, let's do a little bit of a refresher because we'll have some new people to the conversation and we'll have some people that know a lot about glucose, but I think a refresher is always useful. So talk about glucose big picture and why is it that this idea of flattening the curve is so important when it comes to the topic of glucose? So glucose is a molecule and it hangs out in your body and it's your body's preferred energy source. So all of your cells use glucose to do stuff. So your eye cells use it to see, your ear cells to hear, your brain cells to think, your feet cells to dance. It's your body's energy supply. And we get it through the food we eat, the starchy or the sweet foods. So you might think

like, okay, well, if I need energy, the more glucose I have, the better, right? Because that'll give my body the most energy. It turns out that's not the case. It's kind of like if you give a plant too much water, it drowns. If we have too much glucose in our body, bad stuff starts happening. We start seeing consequences. And specifically, if you eat a meal that gives too much glucose too quickly to your body, you see a spike in your blood glucose level, literally. And these spikes are really what cause the consequences. And so if we eat in a way that keep our glucose levels steady, in a way that flattens our glucose curves. We see tremendous impact on our mental and physical health.

You know, in a matter of a few hours, it's quite remarkable. And then you might think, okay, but why should I care? Well, it turns out 90% of us are experiencing glucose spikes on a daily basis. And I'm not talking people with diabetes. I'm talking everyone. And so we're suffering from the consequences without even knowing what's going on inside of us. And that's why applying the hacks that I, you know, I took from the science and distilled is so powerful and is helping so many people heal. You know, in the book, Glucose Revolution, the life-changing power of balancing your blood sugar.

You know, the link we have in the show notes, please go out and pre-order it, order it. It's a fantastic read. And anybody who's, like, deeply on the train, because we've done so many episodes on glucose with Ben Bickman and Dr. Hyman and Dr. Casey Means and a lot of incredible individuals. and now I add you to that list of, you know, leaders that are doing that space. This book is actually a fantastic gift for someone who doesn't know too much about this area, but is suffering. If you're not waking up first thing in the morning and feeling amazing, this book is for you. I stole that from one of your other interviews that I heard you say that in.

So what is really powerful about this information that you're sharing is that people underestimate how much they may actually not be healthy, even if they think that they're doing very healthy things. And that can be influenced by marketing, trends, other stuff. I often use the example that if you go to Times Square and you go and you stop a random person in the street and you say, hey, are you healthy? You know, probably the majority of people are going to answer yes.

Because healthy is based on their definition of what healthy is. That can mean, hey, I'm healthy. only drink two Coca-Cola's a day, right? Or, hey, I'm healthy. I only smoke, you know, a cigarette every so often here and there. Or I only eat desserts a little bit here and there. But this layer of looking at the world of health through the lens that you're setting up in this book and your message on Instagram and social media helps us understand that there's actually some really hardcore science behind these factors of what actually leads to health and what doesn't. So inside of the book, there's a section where you'd start to talk about the problem.

And you help people understand that so many of the things that we've gotten used to in society, both in our short-term health and our long-term health, have a direct connection to regularly being on that blood sugar roller coaster of things spiking up and down. So I want to cover a few of them and have you talk about them big picture so that people can really get a chance to understand that this is, yes, about optimization and if you're your best, but there's other things that are deeply connected to our blood glucose levels. So let's start off with the short term. And let's start off with some of the basics, which are hunger and weight gain.

Help us understand how those things are directly connected to this topic. Absolutely. So hunger, number one. So when your glucose levels are spiking and dropping, that also impacts your hunger hormones. So there's an amazing study that took two groups of people and they gave them that you in one of two breakfasts. Both breakfasts had the same number of calories. Okay, so back to important topic, calories and not everything. Same number of calories. The only difference in the two breakfast was that one spiked their glucose levels and the other one kept the glucose level steady.

And then they measured not only the participants' glucose levels, but also the participants' hunger hormones in their body, the level of hunger hormones. And what they saw is that in the spiky breakfasts, their hunger hormone basically crashed and then came right back up one hour after eating. So they had breakfast at 9 a.m. and at 10 a.m., they were starving. Whereas in the other group, same number of calories, but a steady glucose response from the breakfast. The hunger hormone stayed suppressed for four to five hours. So the glucose spike of your meal is directly going to impact how quickly you're going to feel hungry again. The correlation is plain and simple.

And I mean, remarkable. Can you imagine? Same number of calories. It's just the glucose spike impacts your hunger levels. I mean, incredible. And then what, yeah, go ahead. Yeah, I was just saying it's mind-blowing. And I'd love to give an example because this isn't a conversation and you do this so well.

And you're helping me also go in this direction. I feel like I do a pretty good job, but even more so. So this isn't a conversation about not eating the things that we enjoy. It's a conversation about how do you eat the things that you enjoy. and make modifications so that, you know, the food that you love can love you back, right? Oh, I love that. So let's give a practical example, right? You're talking about spiking our glucose first thing in the morning.

And the classic meal that often gets shit on and talked about, and it deservingly so, is the meal of oatmeal. So oatmeal is a food that a lot of people talk about in this category of blood sugar that it's like, oh, that food might be a no-no. Talk about what it looks like to start off your morning with oatmeal as a no-no, but then when you put in the glucose goddess lens on it, how you can actually make it work for you. Absolutely. So oatmeal is a starch, right? And so when it lands in your system, it very quickly turns into glucose. So if you let it go out naked, it's going to create a big glucose spike. So we just need to put some clothes on it. That's all we need to do. So the most popular clothes to put on it. So the most popular clothes to put on. oatmeal in the morning, if you really want to eat oatmeal, are soft-bored egg, polyphlower rice, nut butter, seeds, protein powder, Greek yogurt, I mean nuts, whole fruits, I would say berries

are a really good option. Those are some really easy clothes to put on your oats to make them all of a sudden not too bad for your glucose levels. Because oats, I mean in my personal experience, if you have naked oats, you're hungry so quickly afterwards, it's outrageous. it's really crazy. So by just putting clothes on it, you're able to eat the oats that you love, if you love oats. But without that big spike, that's causing inflammation, that's causing aging, that's causing weight gain, that's causing cravings a few hours later. Right. And a lot of times people don't eat just oatmeal by itself.

It's usually oatmeal, a glass of orange juice. And so now we start to understand the cumulative effects of these foods that we're so trained to eat through marketing and just TV and other stuff. and we can unpack that and unwind it and say, I can understand how every year I might gain additional pounds, if that's something that somebody's worrying about. I can understand how every year, especially as I start to age, I feel hungry and hungrier or I feel more irritable later on in the day. So understanding the connection between what we eat and how we feel is so central to our human species in so many categories. Another category,

In addition to hunger and weight gain, and this is directly connected to that oatmeal story, is that my wife, when I first met her, she did like having oatmeal in the morning. And often the oatmeal that we get is there's sugar that's added to it if you're not making steel-cut oats at home. So that's another aspect of where you get a glucose spike. And one of the things that she would notice when she started her podcast, she has a podcast where she interviews women who are like changing the game in business and like our self-starters. it's called behind her empire, she would notice that when she has oatmeal first thing in the morning, and if she had an interview later on in the day, she has a really hard time focusing and paying attention. It's really a struggle.

So what do we know about glucose and its ability and being on that blood sugar roller coaster to impact our ability to focus? Totally. And we should circle back to weight gain afterwards because I haven't gotten into it quite deeply yet. So your brain needs glucose for energy too. the cells in your brain need glucose to think. And so your brain is actually incredibly sensitive to the amount of glucose in your body, so much so that there's the blood-brain barrier that protects your brain from all the

crazy stuff happening in your bloodstream. So when you have a glucose spike in your blood, your brain also feels a spike, a much smaller spike, but it's still enough to impact it. And so naturally, like, things will change in the way your brain is functioning. On top of that, every glucose spike creates inflammation in your body. And your brain feels inflammation. It feels the oxidative stress. It feels that its mitochondria being overwhelmed by this glucose spike.

And so your brain has less available energy. And you just simply cannot think as well. It's amazing because 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 yourselves, 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 realized 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. Glacation 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. Any time 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 weight, 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, 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, you know, that we have for our iPhone to make sure that it doesn't 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 of 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. I know 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.

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 last. And, you know, I come from a background where Ayurveda is part of my tradition. and lifestyle and we grow up with our grandparents, saying a lot of things about dosha's and what foods are good for different dosha that are there. And I think one thing for people to also understand

is that we have to look at the lens of how has modern life also modified some of these things that could actually be good from an Ayurvedic perspective, but maybe different in the world that we live in today. So a classic example is that in Ariveda, they often will recommend dairy. So a lot of growing up, people would say, Oh, because your Dosha and everything like that, you would really do well with dairy.

It's cooling for you. It's grounding for you. It's other stuff. So there was a period of my time growing up, and I was a vegetarian growing up where I was consuming a lot of dairy. And nobody really told me, and they didn't really know that the dairy here, especially in the United States, you know, it's better off in Europe and other places. It's full with all sorts of crap inside of it. Not to mention we were drinking skim milk, which is also going to be something that's going to spike you more often than full. fat dairy that's there. So we have to look at the lens of how things have sort of changed in our

modern world. And is it the fruit that's causing a little bit of bloating? And sometimes people will say, well, don't mix too many different things because your enzymes cannot digest. Or is it the meal that you just had and you just happen to have it. So I think running experiments is great. This is why I also think that having a continuous glucose monitor is also a great tool to be able to show you and try it, you know, try it. Even if you wanted to have fruit on empty stomach, at least if you could have some fattier fruit, like having avocado. Some cheese or some nuts. Cheese or nuts. Even with the fruit, like a chakoutary board, you know, even that would

make a significant difference in making sure you didn't have that strong variability throughout the day. And so do you still drink dairy or eat dairy now? What's the situation? Well, what's interesting for me is that at the age of 18, I went to a conference. And at that conference that was part of, you know, that had a lot of, it was like basically like a meditation conference that the Jane community was hosting, this religious community out of India. And I went to go explore it and get more in touch with my roots. I had actually learned it was the first time that I had heard somebody say that dairy can

be linked to inflammation in the gut and our gut microbiome. And I was like, what? That is crazy. I never heard that. Now, I was suffering with systemic, really bad acne that I had in high school. All throughout my four years of high school, as soon as I hit puberty, my acne was really, really bad. And I heard the individual say that, you know, if you have a lot of inflammation in your gut,

and remember, this is back in like the year 2000. Not a lot of people were talking about this thing. Oh, yeah. It was cutting edge back then. Cutting edge back then. They said that if you are suffering with acne, cut the, the dairy out. And they were trying to talk about it more from an animal rights perspective, right? Like our cows are being mistreated. You know, we want to get people off a dairy.

They're mostly talking to an audience of vegetarians. And they're, all my friends are like, cut out dairy. We literally do not eat anything. Like, how the hell are we going to cut out dairy? Like, that's the only thing that we, you know, are left to eat that we actually enjoy. What the hell are we going to be able to order at Taco Bell and all these other places? but because I was suffering so much with acne, I said, you know what, let me try. I cut out dairy and through that process, I started looking around the health food store and without even realizing it, I started cutting out. I knew nothing about glucose.

I knew nothing about sugar spikes, other things. I naturally was cutting out a lot of foods that would typically be the foods that would spike you because I was eating less processed foods, right? And I was just going to a more whole food diet. And within a month and a half, my skin completely cleared up. And everybody was like, whoa, what drug are you on? What thing did you take? What skin cream did you have?

And I tried all that stuff. I tried, you know, all the gels and the creams and other stuff. And it wasn't making a difference. So I'm off of, I went off dairy. And then later on in life, I realized a few years ago that you can include high quality dairy into your diet in a way that makes sense for you. So I have a little bit of goats cheese. I have goat kefir.

I love goat cheese. And I make sure that it's not pre-sweetened with the sugar the, you know, the companies add it into, not the cheese, but the kefir and the yogurts. And it doesn't spike my blood sugar. I feel full and I don't get that reactionary process that's there. So the acne was a symptom, was a message from your body that something was wrong in your gut, right? Exactly.

You know, and that is the moral of so much of this is that, you know, you say it well. and I've heard you another interview say it, your symptoms are a signaling process. You know, just letting you know that something is up in your life. And this is a great opportunity to talk about your origin story before we go deeper into the topic of glucose and how it impacts our long-term health with things like cancer, aging, Alzheimer's, and a whole host of other things. Tell us about how a major event in your life kind of opened your eyes to this whole world that you talk about in your book and on social media.

You know, looking back, I really did not expect this to take me here today, but that's just life. When I was 19, I had a freak accident and I broke my back. One of my vertebrae is exploded. And I had very intense surgery. And for a while, the symptoms were I was just in a lot of freaking pain. like a lot of pain in my back and my legs, et cetera. But very quickly my body healed because I was young and I was, you know, generally doing well. But then I had a lot of mental health issues. I had this thing called depersonization, which is a really weird sensation where you leave your

body. It's close to dissociation. It was very, very stressful for me. Nobody around me knew what it was. I felt very alone. But it became very clear, Drew, that my number one objective, needs to be to wake up every morning feeling well. Because if I don't have that, nothing matters. Literally nothing matters. I couldn't work. I couldn't be creative. I couldn't love.

I couldn't live if my health was not there. And so at the young age of 19, that became my focus. I just had to figure out how to wake up in the morning and feel okay. It was as simple as that. So I had just finished a bachelor's degree in mathematics. I was on the science path. I thought it was really interesting. And I went to grad school to study biochemistry to sort of try to understand, okay, how the

heck does this thing work by body that I'm piloting? Like, how does it work? So I went and studied that. And then that gave me some answers, but I still didn't feel good when I woke up in the morning. Then I went to work in the field of genetics in San Francisco at the company 23 and me. I don't know if you're familiar. And I stayed there for five years and I wanted to understand how my DNA.

worked because I thought, well, if my DNA created my body, if I understand DNA, then I can understand my body and how to feel well, right? Again, not that helpful to me. I mean, your DNA is helpful to tell you what diseases you might get, but it doesn't tell you what to do to wake up tomorrow feeling amazing. And serendipitously, while I was there, I put on a glucose monitor for the first time. There was this pilot study we were doing inside the company. It was just a few people testing this device out. I put it on, scanned it with my phone, saw my glucose level there on my screen, and it just clicked completely. I was like, oh, this is what I've been waiting for. Finally, something that could help me understand what was going on on the inside. And so I developed

this very intimate relationship with my glucose levels. And I realized, Drew, that when my mental health was not okay when I was having episodes of depersonalization, they often correlated with my glucose levels spiking. And so that was just the beginning of everything for me. I was like, okay, I get it. The point is keep my glucose levels steady. And this was four years ago. So back then it was nobody was really talking about it yet. And so I dove into all the research and I realized, oh my God, 90% of people are having glucose spikes every day. And oh my God, look at all these hacks that I can summarize from the scientific studies. And I created this sort of new lifestyle for myself using all my glucose hacks.

And I healed. I healed not only my mental health issues. I healed my skin. My period became regular again. I was able to understand how to wake up in the morning feeling amazing. I had steady energy all day. it was a total revolution for me and it was really the answer

I had been looking for for almost 10 years. I mean, it was a while of searching and this gave me many, many answers. I mean, of course, I'm still a work in progress, lots of other things that I'm still working on, but this was really fundamental to me feeling well and to me being able to create and be in the world in the way that I wanted to be in the world

and to be my optimal self. It's such an important reminder. First of all, like all, Like all of us, you're a beautiful work in progress. We're all a work in progress. We're all working on the different things that are there. Yeah. And it's a reminder that, you know, there are so many categories of life.

When the dots start to connect, there's so many categories of life. Once you start to go down the rabbit hole of glucose, insulin, that whole world and our optimal metabolic health, there's so many things that we have no idea that in some way, are either directly connected or made worse when our blood sugar is out of control. And for you, you know, it took a major event, as it often does for a lot of heroes. You know, they have their hero's journey. They have that life opening moment that sets them on the path. But I honor your commitment to continue working on yourself, but then also to share it with other individuals.

What started happening when you were sharing? The first time that you started telling people like, hey, this is what happened to me. and I am getting better. And this seems to be what the literature is saying. Let's have you try it too. And let's see what happens. Do you have any anecdotes or early stories from the first time that you started sharing this knowledge that you were building up? And what response you were getting and what people were feeling from practicing your advice.

Yeah. So picture this. I'm in San Francisco. And I have a million tabs open on my internet browser. And I'm making all these changes to my life. And I'm feeling amazing. And I'm discovering all this science. so I printed out some scientific papers.

And I was like, I'm going to show my friends so they can feel good too. And so I went to my friends and I was like, look, Thomas, this study says that you should eat your food in the right order and you'll feel amazing. And I was like, read it, read it. Crickets, man, like nobody cared about the scientific papers. They were like, okay, Jesse, whatever. And you know, I'm kind of a, you know, I get excited about stuff. So they were like, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, let's dismiss this, like a lot of other things. And so I thought to myself, okay, this is actually just a communication issue.

Like, I really believe this is life-changing information. I just need to understand how to communicate it to people. Because the science is there. The problem was nobody cared. So my mission became, how do I get people to see what's happening? How do I get them to care and to try this? So I thought, I'm going to use data from my own continuous glucose monitor to illustrate these principles.

that have been found in the scientific papers. So I wrote this little piece of software because the app that the glucose monitor came with was not doing what I wanted it to do. So I wrote this piece of software that extract, so scrappy, so like startup Silicon Valley vibes. The software extracted the data from my glucose monitor and created these pretty graphs

that I have to this day on my Instagram and that are the foundation of my work. And it allowed me to put side by side the glucose spikes created by two different things. So for example, eating a piece of bread on its own versus eating the bread with some avocado on it. The piece of bread on its own was a bigger spike and bread and avocado smaller spike. And I would just put them side by side. And then I started showing these images to my friends. And then they got very interested. I mean, humans are visual creatures. And all of a sudden

they were like, oh, whoa, cool. And they got it. And I was like, yes, I solved. And I was like, yes, I solved it. And so I kept doing it and I kept illustrating the scientific papers with my own data and my friends started doing the hacks and they felt so much better. So then they started showing the hacks to their families and their friends and people started feeling better. And then they said, hey, can you put this online somewhere? Because I was just texting these to my friends, these little graphs I had made. And so I was asked to put these online. And so I created an Instagram account. And I started just sharing the graphs. And I haven't stopped. It's been three years. And now many, many people are benefiting from this illustration of the science. And that's what I love so much. I've

turned these incredible scientific discoveries done by these teams across the world into something that people get. I've solved the communication issue. And it gets me just so fired up to have done this because I think it's awesome. It's really this next wave of, you know, a lot of papers that get written. and you talk to the individuals behind it, they're lucky if a few hundred people, you know, in their field, end up reading that thing. And yet there's so much gems. There's so many gems and knowledge that are buried in it.

And scientists don't typically, let's say that first generation, above us, they don't typically get that training in the communication. In fact, they're discouraged. They're discouraged to talk about the practical applications of it because they don't want to seem like an advocate. They have to say very neutral and they have to end all their statements with, and we've had some of those people on the podcast

and I get how hard it is, they have to end their statements with, well, more science is needed on this topic, right? But there's plenty of things that we can take away from and the public is just, you know, confused and they're looking for answers. And the alternative is, if the scientists don't speak up

and start sharing in a practical way that makes sense, then media will hop on the bandwagon and sensationalized things. And there was even a report that came out a few years ago that of the headlines that talk about scientific papers featured in different journals, 40% of the headline gets the entire paper wrong in terms of what is actually being talked about.

And a lot of things play into that, agendas, you know, etc. Sensationalism, clicks, whatnot. So the fact that you are taking that time to walk people through it and doing it on a visual realm. Some people are more written, some people more visual. We all need to hear things in a different way. Makes a huge difference in, again, the stickiness of us remembering things. So let's talk about a couple of those that are there

and how they help us maybe understand a context or a category. So one that I thought you did a pretty good job with was Rice. So what did you find out? If you're listening on the audio, you can look at it in the show notes to the link to this graph. 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, 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 that 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, green salad with something. 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 to them.

Let's take another category and another image. I have your Instagram pulled up. And that is this post that you had. It's in the show notes for anybody that's listening. 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, cravings appearance in the afternoon.

So, vegetables with vinegar before starches, super, super important. The fiber in 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, hmm, that looks really

tasty. I'm going to have it in five minutes. You order a vegetable-based start. It can be anything. It can be beans. It can be sourcrats. 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 during 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 desserts. And you probably don't really crave anything sweet.

So maybe you just split dessert with your friends instead of feeling like you need 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 level 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. You know, I'll see these different posters sometimes that life is short, eat whatever you want, you know, 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 us.

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 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 craving, is 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 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 position? 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. A lot of people got sick.

A 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 study 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. It'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 limited unless if 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. 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. Yes. I want to pivot to longevity and aging. I think I saw that you had an endorsement from the book from David Sinclair. Is that correct? That's correct. Yeah. That's great. Congratulations on that.

And we're big fans of him and his podcast. He'll be on here soon. And longevity. You want another story? Oh, please, please. Tell me. So I found out, I think, almost two years ago that David Sinclair was following me on Instagram.

And I mean, I'm a huge fan of his. So I was like, super Star Trek. I was like, oh, my God, David Sinclair. And so when I was writing the book, my, my publishers asked me, you know, make a list of the people you'd love to get an endorsement from. And, you know, I had Tim Spector, Robert Lerner. and I had David Sinclair on that and I was like, so how do I get it? And they were like, well, just send it to him, send him an email. So I asked for his email and I sent him the book and I was

really nervous. And he replied to me and he was like, oh my God, of course. I'm a big fan. Here's, I'm going to read the book. Here's the endorsement. And it was incredible. So it was just a good lesson and, you know, ask for stuff because you never know. They might say yes. So I'm very grateful to him and all the other amazing endorsers that have read the book and see the value and I think it's really cool that we're all in the same team. And we all just want people to be happy and healthy. So it's lovely to be part of the group. It's so true.

And I'm glad you did that. I'm glad you put yourself out there and ask for those things. It's a great reminder for everybody. And of course, for those who are not familiar, David Sinclair, doing a lot of really great stuff in the space of aging and longevity, which a lot of people are talking about this year. It's gotten a lot of attention, especially with a lot more awareness around the topic. And sometimes, unfortunately, though, when we talk about aging,

there's a lot of focus on the next technology or this miracle drug that's being worked on in the background, which I hope that those things come. And even sometimes the Silicon Valley approach to aging. What often gets overlooked is how our core aspect of what we eat can accelerate aging. So what did you find out and what's important to talk about when it comes to the topic of aging and longevity and glucose? Yeah. So every time our glucose levels spike, all the glucose floating around is creating this process called glycation. And literally glycation is aging. So when you put a chicken in the oven and it goes brown, it's being glycated. And the faster we glycates, the faster we age, the faster our organs deteriorate and the faster we die. With every glucose spike, we're aging our body. And if you take two people, both, 70 years old, let's say, one had X million glucose spikes in their life and the other one had half those glucose spikes. The person who had half those glucose spikes is going to look

way younger and is going to be way younger internally. So every day, the way you're eating and its impact on your glucose levels is dictating how quickly you're aging. It's insane. Aging internally, aging externally, as I mentioned the wrinkles, of course. And there's a very well-known test of people who have diabetes. It's the HBA-1-C test, and it measures how much glycation was happening in your body for the past three months. And literally what it's measuring is how many red blood cell proteins have been glycated by glucose. It's measuring how quickly you're cooking on the inside. And so the higher HBA-1-C, the faster you're cooking, the faster you're aging.

So it's very powerful to revisit a little bit the way you're eating and apply the easy. glucose hacks that I share because long term you're going to see the benefits and you're not going to age as quickly. And honestly, when I found this out, I was really starstruck because I didn't realize this impact on aging. I understood the mechanisms behind hunger and cravings and diabetes, etc. But this really blew my mind. And I really wanted people to know because it's really important. We're always looking for the anti-aging pill. But actually, food is a really powerful place to start. And the second one is exercise. I mean, exercise is the most powerful anti-aging drug.

And if they could put it in a pill, it would be the miracle pill. So unfortunately, a lot of times, you know, anti-aging is about stuff that is lifestyle-related, to be honest. And Peter Atia actually posted this nice post on Instagram. I think it was yesterday or the day before showing this study that showed exactly that, that if you look at exercise, it's one of the most powerful anti-aging drugs you can take. One of the most powerful experiences I had from wearing a glucose, a continuous glucose monitor is that it made me more accountable to my movement and my exercise. I would notice the weeks that I didn't hit my sort of goal of like three sort of high intensity workouts.

Again, that's my goal. That's not everybody else's goal. I want to hit at least three high intensity workouts. I was eating the same basic diet, but my average glucose was so much higher when I didn't have those minimum workouts that I had, 30 minutes, three times a week, high-intensity workouts with, you know, the trainer that I work out with on Zoom. So that's another reason why that, again, if you can afford it, I do think that experimenting at least for one month with the glucose monitor is helpful because you start to see how all these things are connected.

What was your relationship with movement and exercise, and did it change as you started to go deeper into this category of glucose? When I first put on a glucose monitor, one thing that shocked me is that sometimes when I exercised, I actually saw a glucose spike during the workout. And I was like, what's happening? Isn't this bad? Am I supposed to avoid glucose spikes? So is exercise bad? So I did the research. And in fact, actually, sometimes when you're exercising, your body will release glucose from the liver to fuel your muscles because your muscles need glucose to contract to make energy and help you lift all the heavy weights and stuff. And so that spike you're seeing is actually your body releasing stored glucose. And in that case, even though the spike has the consequences I mentioned previously, the negative consequences, overall, exercising helps your body fight to these. it helps your body reduce inflammation, reduce the quickness of aging, and reduce insulin release. So overall, the first thing I under it is that overall, even if you see a spike while you're

exercising, it's actually overall good for your body. Then second, I realized that a very easy thing you could do after you eat something to reduce the glucose spike of the meal was actually to use your muscles for a little bit. So your muscles need energy to contract and the fastest place the fastest way they get energy is from the glucose in your bloodstream. So if you've just had a meal that's creating a big glucose spike, what you can do is just use your muscles for 10 minutes. And this can be doing the laundry, going for a walk with your dog, dancing to your favorite song, like going up and down the stairs at the office, whatever.

If you do this, as the glucose is rushing into your bloodstream from your digestive system, your muscles are going to uptake it. You're going to soak it up and they're going to soak it up and they're going to reduce the glucose spike. So you get a much smaller glucose spike from the same meal that you just ate. And that's pretty cool because oftentimes, especially after dinner, we tend to just kind of sit there. But if we just get up and move a little bit, it has a big impact on our physical and mental health. And for me, it has a huge impact on how tired I feel after eating.

If instead of just sitting there, I go even for a 10-minute walk, I don't have that crash anymore because I'm helping my body not experience the glucose roller coaster. much steadier in how I feel for the rest of the day. Growing up, my grandparents were religious about after dinner. We'd all go on a walk around the neighborhood. And I thought it was the weirdest thing. You know, you're walking around with your entire family around the neighborhood. And it was a beautiful thing looking back at that. And there was just something intrinsically that they knew.

It was just built in part of it. They didn't have the words. They didn't know about the studies. But it was something intrinsically they knew that this would end up helping everybody feel better. And even my grandmother one time told me on my dad's side that it'll help you sleep better too. And again, I didn't know, is this like, just like, you know, home remedies, you know, old wise tales, other stuff. But I think that she was on to something. She was on to something and she knew that if we can bring our blood sugar back in balance, it impacts our sleep. And you've

written about this a little bit. Yeah. And you know, actually drew so many times, there are these cultural traditions that have been passed on for generations and generations, and they don't understand the underlying mechanism, but now with our current technology, we're able to see the impact on glucose. So some other examples are, for example, in countries like Iran, they drink a lot of apple cider vinegar, and they make it themselves, and they drink it all the time every day. There is also this tradition of starting the meal with vegetables. Like in France, we start meals traditionally with crudite, which are raw vegetables.

In other countries, it's like bunches of herbs by the bunch. You know, in Italy, it's antipasty, which is vegetable-based. And so it's very interesting to me to see how actually, culturally, we've had a lot of things right for a very long time. But now it's cool that with the data and with the science, we're able to understand why exactly it works. Your grandmother was totally right. Yeah.

How does getting good quality sleep play into this conversation? So the biggest impact I see, the biggest relationship between sleep and glucose is, for one, if you go to sleep with a big glucose spike happening in your body, if you go to bed in that state, you're going to wake up the next day not well rested. I mean, if your glucose levels were doing a roller coaster throughout the night because you had a very heavy glucose spiking meal for dinner, you're going to wake up feeling a little hungover, to be honest, from those glucose spikes. And unfortunately, when we wake up feeling tired, our body for that day is not going to be as good as usual in terms of processing glucose coming in. So the same food will create a bigger spike. I have this test that I love showing it's cappuccino after I've slept well versus cappuccino when I'm super tired. And when I'm super tired, the cappuccino creates a spike, even though when I'm rested, it's like totally steady. because your body like, you know, like we even feel it in our brain,

but when we're tired, systems just don't run as smoothly in our body is just not as effective as usual in helping dispose of glucose spikes. So what I want to say is that when you're tired, it's even more important to use the glucose hacks because you know you're going to be at a disadvantage. You know the same foods you usually eat are going to be creating bigger glucose spikes

and bigger crashes and more. more likelihood of cravings. So if you wake up and you're tired, have a savory breakfast. Try to avoid anything sweet in the morning. Because as a result, your glucose after your breakfast will be steadier, and you won't start the cravings roller coaster. If you have something sweet, I know it's very tempting because when we're tired, we just feel like, oh, sugar's going to give me energy.

Actually, sugar's not going to give you energy. Sugar is going to overwhelm your mitochondria. Your mitochondria are going to shut down, and I'm not going to be able to give you the energy. the energy you need. We feel that sugar gives us energy because it makes us feel pleasure in our brain, but that's not the same thing as actually your body having energy. Another good one to come back to the muscles. If you wake up feeling tired, do five minutes of movement in the morning. Maybe you do like 50 jumping jacks or whatever you like doing, I don't know, dance to a few songs. This will help

your muscles wake up and become more sensitive to glucose coming through into your bloodstream. and therefore they'll be better at soaking it up whenever it comes through during the day. Powerful. All simple reminders are like very powerful when we start to stack them together. And now you can see that even though it starts to seem like a lot, it's really not because they're all interlinked. And when you feel amazing, it's just like, of course I'm going to do this. This is like automatic.

It's easy. And we're not talking about removing entire food groups from your diet. it's really additive stuff, which is what I love so much about this philosophy, we're not taking away anything. We're just adding fun, easy, cool habits that have a huge impact on how you're going to feel and your happiness leveled. I mean, I don't think everybody wakes up in the morning feeling amazing. And if you don't wake up in the morning feeling amazing, you need this information because it's going to help you get there. That was my experience. So I know it for a fact, but it's really important. And at the beginning of the podcast, you said something about Zeitgeist. And I really

hope that all these hacks will just become part of our culture. And everybody will just know about this. That it will just be like your grandmother knew to walk after dinner, that we're all going to know to start on meals with a vegetable starter, to have some vinegar, to eat food in the right order and everything else I share. That's my hope. That's my hope as well. And you're a major contributor to that. I want to run through, if you have a little bit more time, a few other categories that people start to unpack and maybe rethink a little bit in how they're approaching it when they understand the framework of how glucose relates to how they feel. So you mentioned cappuccino a little earlier. And there's this principle inside the book we've talked about a little bit

before, flatten your breakfast. Now, even a lot of people that know that we don't want to eat dessert for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and especially breakfast, you know, very sugary, oatmeal, yogurts, other things like that with a lot of added sugar, big glasses of orange juice and things like that. We know we want to minimize that or maybe avoid that as a way to start the day. Still, there's a lot of people that are having their sweetened, caffeinated beverage in the morning. What did you, what have been some things that you've seen of how we can still enjoy our caffeine, maybe still enjoy some of the milk of our choice, but avoid that heavy, intense spike that often comes from having a very highly sweetened liquid beverage first thing

in the morning. So there are a few things you can do. First, you can switch your liquid beverage and not have the sweet liquid beverage anymore. So if we're talking like a tall vanilla, frappuccino, yada, yada, change. to something that is just coffee and milk or coffee and cream. So switch to doing things like lattes, cappuccinos, make your own cool little blended coffee drink in the morning that doesn't include sugar. Because fundamentally, the shape of your breakfast curve is going to impact so severely the rest of your day. It is incredible. It's very important to get this right because

it's completely going to change how you feel for the rest of the day. And my philosophy for breakfast is sugars and starches at breakfast should be for taste, for taste only, for pleasure only. You should build your breakfast around protein and fat and fiber, and that's your real breakfast. And then you can have a breakfast dessert. So you can have the tall vanilla frappuccino thing or you can have some chocolate if you really want it for breakfast dessert. But do not break the fast with anything that creates a big glucose spike. because when we're fasted, our body is just ready and is incredibly sensitive to anything we give it. So that vanilla frappuccino is going to create a humongous spike in your system,

a lot of inflammation, a lot of aging, a lot of weight gain, a lot of dysregulation of all of your hormones. You need to help your body not be so affected by these things. And the way to do it is to first have a savory breakfast built around protein, fat, and fiber. and then if you really want it to have the breakfast dessert. I think to add to that because a lot of my audience is like, well, I don't go to Starbucks. I don't have that Frappuccino that's there, but they get that oat milk latte. And they get that sweetened almond milk barista version of almond milk that has a lot of amulsifiers and other things inside of it, but a lot of sugar inside of it as well.

So even switching to an unsweetened plant-based milk. So many people are drinking plant-based milks and that category is taken off. And I'm one of those individuals. But really reaching for the one that doesn't have sugar because we know now, after doing many episodes with different experts that are out there, liquid sugar in particular is quite harmful for us, especially first thing in the morning if we're doing it every single day. and coffee and coffee rituals is typically something that people do every single day. And what you can do when you go, if you go to the coffee shop, for example, ask to just see the ingredients on their nut milk. So I usually do almond milk, a whole milk.

Have a look on the pack because if it says just 100% almonds, you're fine. But if it says almonds and cane sugar, then you don't want to be drinking that. But they have a lot of unsweetened versions of nut milk. I'm a big whole milk person, which is, you know, fine for your glucose. levels. And it's better than skim milk, as you mentioned, because while whole milk and skim milk have the same amount of naturally occurring sugars in them, whole milk also has fat. And the fat in the whole milk is literally putting clothes on the milk sugar, preventing it from creating too much of a spike. That's why it's important to have the whole milk version, the whole versions of

things, because they come naturally with these clothes on. A little note on oat milk. So oat is a starch. Oat turns to glucose as we digest it. Oat milk is very, very high in glucose because it's made from a starch. It's not made from a nut and doesn't come from a cow or something like that. So naturally, it actually creates a very big spike. Now, it seems to depend on the type of oat milk, but generally you see a pretty big spike when you have an oatmeal-based coffee drink. So here's the solution, because I know people love oat milk and they don't want to give it up.

So the solution for your oat milk spike is don't have it on an empty stomach. So if you just want to not have a big breakfast in the morning, have like 20 almonds and then have your oatmeal. And then go for a little walk. Don't just grab the oatmeal first thing and then sit for three hours. Help your body process it. Help your body not have all these consequences. Better yet, have it after a savory breakfast. Have it as your breakfast dessert.

Or have it in the afternoon, for example, as I don't know. It's kind of weird to have coffee. after lunch, but whatever. If this floats your boat, you can do it like that too. Have it after lunch, after you've eaten lunch and the food in your lunch in the right order. And before you go up and down the stairs. You could also do vinegar before your oatmeal latte, if you so wished to. That would also work.

There's lots of things you can do. But if you don't really care for oat milk, switch. Do whole milk. Do almond milk. I mean, nothing's perfect. but in terms of your glucose levels, oat milk is not the best choice. Yeah, it's really tough. I will say anecdotally from the friends that I've gifted glucose monitors to and the family members,

you know, generally they all have like compared to the standard American diet or the process to, you know, world diet that's out there. They generally have are headed way more in the right direction. But across the board, usually, you know, I've seen like eight out of ten, their biggest food that gets reported back when they get their weekly emails, if they're using something like levels or whatever app they're using, or if they're just taking notes themselves, the biggest thing that is the spike for them often ends up being that oat milk latte. Wow.

Yeah. Again, because we traditionally have it first thing in the morning, we have it on an empty stomach. People often don't even drink water before they reach for their coffee. So be careful. You know, oats, there's a lot of glyphosate contamination, other things. it's just hard to really make it work. But if you do need to, Jesse just gave you a few ways where you can try, but then get a glucose monitor to actually see if it ends up working.

Jesse, what about the category of alcohol? How do we think about alcohol? Do you drink alcohol yourself? And, you know, there's a few layers to alcohol. We know that alcohol isn't a health food, so to speak, right? And that there are links to a lot of different conditions that are out there. But a lot of people do enjoy alcohol socially. I'm one of those individuals.

What have we seen when it comes to the topic of glucose and alcohol? And any kind of caveats that you would add to that conversation around alcohol? So I would just start off by saying that there's no health benefits to drinking alcohol. It's not something that's good for your body. It's difficult for your liver to process. and so when you do drink alcohol, think about it this way. Think, okay, I'm already giving alcohol to my body to process. Let's avoid, on top of that, giving it a glucose spike,

because then it has to deal with the alcohol and the glucose spike, and that's just a lot for your liver to handle. So here are the things that you can drink, if you're drinking alcohol, that do not give a glucose spike. So any wine is fine, apart from the very, very sweet wines that have a lot of leftover sugar from fermentation, but any regular white or red wine that you would order normally is fine. Sparkling wine is also okay, champagne, etc.

And then, you know, hard alcohols are also fine from Mugdouca's perspective. However, the real kicker here is the mixers. So if you're having gin, for example, there's a massive difference between a gin tonic and a gin soda. A gin tonic contains extra sugar in the tonic. A gin soda doesn't. So when you're mixing hard alcohols with other things, try to think, okay, what's not going to be too sweet?

So the go-to that everybody likes and enjoys is soda water with lime or lemon. That's a really easy one, to be honest. But then if you go for Coca-Cola, if you go for fruit juices, I mean, all of that is going to create a glucose spike. So what you can do is use your muscles, dance. usually when we drink alcohol we like to dance so highly encouraged dancing after consuming a cocktail

that has a lot of sugar in it that's a good one but yeah I mean wine is fine beer depends on the beer there are a bunch of low carb beers now that exist to be honest and not a very big beer drinker so I don't know much about them

but all in all you know also when we drink alcohol we know that it's for pleasure and not for health so it might be one of those cases where you just kind of drink whatever you like. And another thing, connecting you back to the beginning part of the conversation is that I've noticed over the years, I'm turning 40 this year, is that as I've cleaned up my diet, one, I need to drink way less to feel any sort of buzz or things like that.

Number two, because you are so sensitive and you so enjoy, your baseline is health and you feel so good when you wake up first thing in the morning when you've cleaned up your diet and balance your blood sugar, you actually naturally start cutting down on these things that even if they don't spike your blood glucose like wine does, it does have other detrimental challenges that are there, especially if you drink a lot of it. And you start to get addicted to feeling really good. So you start to wind down and cut down. So in the past, it used to be, I never was a big alcohol drinker to begin with. I didn't even really start drinking wine until I was in my like mid-20s. And whenever I would have it, I'd say, okay, maybe a glass or two. And it would be a glass or two,

and it'd be a couple times a month. Now, I still am on about a couple times a month if I'm out socially. I just went out with a friend with my wife and he invited us to his restaurant here in L.A. called the tasting kitchen, my buddy Mark. And they had a really incredible bottle of this limited vineyard wine that his wine connoisseur went to Italy and goes and finds like the greatest places. It was like, you guys got to try this. And I was like, you know what?

I'm with friends. I would love to try it. And I was really worried the wine tasted great, but I naturally saw myself not drinking as much. Like, I don't even feel, I don't even finish the whole glass sometimes now because I still enjoy it. I like the taste of it. I like the romance of it. I like the feeling of it. But I don't even need to finish it to feel good or to feel anything.

So I've just naturally cut down the amount of alcohol that's there. We also did a big episode with Dr. Richard Johnson, who's one of the world's experts in uric acid. And he wanted to remind our audience that, sure, wine and certain alcohols don't spike glucose, but there's a mechanism where they can actually cause your body to produce its own fructose through uric acid, which has other downstream consequences. So for all my friends that are posting on Instagram after drinking that, you know, that glass of wine or three or whatever, saying, oh my gosh, I love wine. It doesn't spike my glucose. There's a few caveats that are there to be aware. Yes. And actually, I think these

caveats are very, very important because if you wear a glucose monitor without too much context, you can start drawing wrong conclusions. You can think that, for example, alcohol is good for me because it doesn't spike my glucose levels, or eating something incredibly fatty is good for me because it doesn't spike my glucose levels, because if you put enough fat on something, it'll keep your glucose level steady, but it won't be good for you. So I think context is very important. Education is very important. I hope that anybody out there who, where's a glucose monitor, always thinking about it, will also consider, you know, going through my book at first because I go into all these details. And so it really helps you interpret the data in a way that is

more informed. Because when I first started wearing glucose monitor, as I mentioned, I was like, is exercise bad for me and wine is good for me? Like, I don't understand. So it's complicated. Glucose is not everything. Glucose is a really powerful lever to start with, but it is not everything. You also have to think about other stuff, you know, relationships, medical care. sleep, happiness, stress. But in my experience, if you get your glucose levels under control, as you just said, all these other things start falling into place. You don't actually want to drink that much anymore because you wake up in the morning

feeling really good and you don't want to compromise that anymore. I totally relate to that, Drew. Like, in the morning, I feel so good that I think twice about, you know, having a lot to drink because I don't want to wake up not feeling well. I love feeling good. And I was praying to feel good for so many years that now that I have this, what feels like incredible wealth of happiness, I don't want to give it up. There's a section in the book where you say, a day in the life of a glucose goddess.

Walk us through that. You know, we've teased a little bit throughout the interview of different ways to go about it. But people are always looking to examples. And that example helps them visualize like, wow, I can do this too. So walk us through the day on the life of glucose goddess. And by the way, do you have a term for the men that want to identify inside of your community? Is it a glucose homie, a glucose bro? Like, what do you call the –

It's a glucose god. It's – so we have glucose goddesses, glucose gods, and non-binary glucose royalty. I'm going to start going on Instagram and calling myself a glucose god. And let's see how fast it takes for me to get canceled. Oh, come on. But the point is everybody can be a glucose god, goddess, non-binary god-like thing. I think it's cool to think about, yeah, how do you put all these in practice? So in the book, as you said, at the end, I sort of go through typical days and situations.

And of course, there's many more examples throughout the book of how to incorporate the hacks into your life. But I took a day of my own life and I just actually wrote it out. So this is the day. So I wake up, savory breakfast at home, let's say like some. scrambled eggs, some hummus, some sea salt, maybe like a few pickled cauliflower from my fridge. And I've started treating breakfast just as a normal meal. And as a result, I feel amazing. I don't have a hunger at 11 a.m. and my energy is super steady. Then I would probably add to that a whole milk cappuccino. And then I would go to work or wherever I'm going. And I try to avoid snacking

too much in the morning because one, I'm not hungry and two, it deregulates my glucose levels. So maybe a green tea. But then what often happens to me, Drew, is that as I'm walking around, I often see a very tasty-looking pastry. I just have a radar for like really good chocolate-based things in my vicinity. So what I would often do is I would see a really amazing-looking cookie or slice of cake. And I would buy it, but I would keep it for dessert after lunch. Mm-hmm. So, mm-hmm.

You know what's interesting about that is that just. even buying it, there's a dopamine reward, right? Yeah. But then we can practice that delayed gratification and save it for later. Because there's part of us that feels, again, that little kid inside of us that if I don't do it now, I'm never going to get it. And a lot of people have that. It's okay to admit that you might be one of those individuals that do.

I didn't even think about that, but this is something that I'll find myself doing sometimes is I'll buy it. And just knowing that I have it, whether or not I eat it later on or not, is something something that makes you feel good. But anyways, asking you back to you to walk through the day. Next time you do that, send me a photo and I'll be like, yes, nice one. I just bought some cake. So then for lunch, usually at lunch I don't really crave having any carbs, any starches.

So I usually have like a big salad, a big salad with a bunch of olive oil, maybe some fish and some feta, spinach, nuts. And then I'll have the cake that I bought or the cookie that I bought. And then I will go for a walk after lunch, 100%. And then in the evening, let's say I'm having friends over, for example, I'll serve while people are arriving, I'll serve a big plate of vegetables or crudiette or like, you know, maybe some guac with some carrots and some cucumbers, something that people can eat while they're waiting for the meal that isn't bread.

And as a result, they're going to be lining their stomach and their intestine with this really lovely, helpful mesh. And then for dinner, I'll serve something like some fish and some vegetables and then some starches. I love starches in the evening. They just make me feel really cozy and nice and warm. So whether it's potatoes, a pasta or rice, you know, I know to eat the starches after the veggies, the proteins, and the fats. And by now, my friends also know to do this. And then a dessert.

Let's say maybe like some strawberries and some clotted cream or like maybe some. some pastries I made, something like that. And then I'll take all my friends and I'll go for a walk with them around the block as your grandmother does. Because that way when everybody comes back, they actually have energy and they want to help me clean up the house. It's a trick. Very good trick.

That's a sample day, but obviously it changes every day. And some days, Drew, I don't feel like doing the hacks and I don't do them and that's totally fine. But most of the days, they're so easy and fun that they've just become part of my life and part of the lives of hundreds and thousands of people. And I hope soon in the lives of everybody listening. Well, Jesse, it's been a fantastic episode. And I so appreciate your commitment to making this work accessible and also fun. Fun is an important part of this process. Just hearing you walk through your day, there was a resounding feeling of, well, that not only

seems doable, but it feels like fun because you're integrating your friends. You guys are walking together, you are slowing down, you're getting a chance to enjoy life. And I think that sometimes when it comes to behavior change, many of us can underestimate the power of fun. And to me, some of that comes from this idea of beating ourselves up when we think we've gotten off the wagon, so to speak. But I think if you follow these tools and these principles, you can step out of that not only blood sugar roller coaster, but the roller coaster of stopping to beating yourself up and not being

on yourself view. The all or nothing view. Yeah. Do you want to, in closing, do you want to share anything a little bit more about that and, you know, kind of why you feel that your message is an important message that you want to present to people in this world where health can feel so, all or nothing? I think the all or nothing mentality leads to suffering and it leads to guilt. and it often doesn't work, because if we do something that's so challenging and difficult,

like cutting out carbohydrates entirely from our diet or doing some sort of complicated, very restrictive new lifestyle, it doesn't make us happy and we can't sustain it. So really what we're looking for are easy tips that have a huge impact, that are fun, and that are incredibly easy to start doing today, say like all the tips on my book. And it's just really cool for me to share this because honestly, there's not many other philosophies that actually take those boxes and that help people remove all the guilt that they might have accumulated around eating carbs or feel guilty or feel like they don't have enough willpower. I feel like this is the way.

and the resounding message I get from people who started playing the hacks is they tell me they've reconnected with their body and they feel like their body is their friend now. And instead of beating their body up and being like, why don't you look this way? Why do I feel like this? The relationship shifts and they're able to find that happiness again in the feeding of their body and their soul. So I hope people take that away because it's a beautiful thing to witness. Beautiful message, an important message. The book is out.

Glucose Revolution, the life-changing power of balancing your blood sugar. If you're listening, the link is in the show notes. Jesse, thank you for being you, a bright and shining star in the world who's committed to continuing to educate people and empower them. I appreciate you, and I appreciate you for coming on the podcast. Thank you, Drew, for having me. And in closing, I will say one thing. My mother is a huge fan of you.

So she just wanted to say hi. Oh, that's sweet. What's her first name? Diane. Diane, thank you for listening. We appreciate you too. Thanks for raising such a great daughter. Jesse, this is great. Can't wait to hang out in L.A. and enjoy a nice meal together with a little bit of sweet at the end. We'll figure out what that is, a little bit of pastry or chocolate.

We'll figure it out. Totally. Thank you, Drew.