Instant Genius - Blood sugar and your health, with Jessie Inchauspé

Episode Date: March 21, 2022

Jessie Inchauspé, author of Glucose Revolution, explains how spikes in our blood sugar are affecting how well we function on a day-to-day basis, and even speeding up the ageing process. Once you’ve mastered the basics with Instant Genius, dive deeper with Instant Genius Extra, where you’ll find longer, richer discussions about the most exciting ideas in the world of science and technology. Only available on Apple Podcasts. Produced by the team behind BBC Science Focus Magazine. Visit our website: sciencefocus.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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this is Instant Genius, a bite-sized masterclass in podcast form. I'm Sarah Rigby, online staff writer at sciencefocus.com. In this week's episode, I'm talking to Jesse in Chelsby. She's the author of Glucose Revolution, The Life-Changing Power of Balancing Your Blood Sugar, and founder of the Glucose Goddess Instagram community. She tells me all about how spikes in our blood sugar are affecting how well we function on a day-to-day basis and even speeding up the aging process.

Can you please start off by telling us a bit about yourself? Of course, Sarah. So I'm French. I studied mathematics in undergrad, actually in London and King's College. And then I studied biochemistry in the US. And then I worked for five years in Silicon Valley in the field of genetics. And that's where I discovered that glucose was the answer to many questions I had. been asking myself for a very long time. And what do you research? So I'm not technically a proper researcher anymore. I don't actually work at a university. What I do is I translate the research of many, many amazing researchers across the world into easy, digestible tips for anybody to use and apply to their lives. Okay, great. And could you tell us a little bit about your book, please?

Absolutely. My book, Glucose Revolution, the Life-changing Power of Balancing Your Blood Sugar. And it's everything you need to know about why glucose is so important and really easy hacks to feel better physically and mentally instantly. You have an Instagram community, don't you? With the glucose goddesses. Could you tell us a bit about that? Absolutely. Yes. So it's called glucose goddess. And when I first discovered the science of glucose and it changed my life, I wanted to then share it with the world. So all these little tips that I had extracted from the science and the visual representations of the scientific discoveries, I started putting them on Instagram so that everybody could see them and use them. And it's grown, you know, far beyond anything I had ever imagined. I think we're

over 350,000 followers now of the account. And it's really my first way of sharing the science with the world. And the book is the second way, the more complete, the more thorough, the deeper way. But the Instagram is really what started everything. So let's talk about glucose a bit. what exactly is glucose and what does it do in the body? Glucose is a molecule and it is your body's preferred energy source. So every one of your cells, each one of your cells in your body, uses glucose to create energy and perform a function. So for example, your eye cells use glucose to be able to see,

your brain cells use glucose to be able to think, your feet cells use glucose to be able to dance all night. So your body really needs a tremendous amount of glucose. The actual organelles that are in charge of turning glucose into energy are your mitochondria, which are in each one of your cells. And so that's the basis of it. And your body functions perfectly when the amount of glucose that it receives is equal to the amount of glucose that it needs to function. And we get glucose to the food we eat, either through starches or through sugars. Now, if you don't eat any glucose, it's so important that your body actually makes it from within.

So that's debunking the myth that says that you need to eat sugar to have energy. That's actually not true. But since most of us eat starches and sugars anyway, we get the glucose we need through the food we eat. Now, the issue is too much glucose isn't good for the body. If you take a plant and you give it too much water, it drowns. If you take a human and you give it too much oxygen, it passes out. And similarly, if you deliver to your mitochondria more glucose than they need,

problems start happening. Your mitochondria sort of shut down and are not able to function properly anymore. And this is the basis of many, many issues physical and mental. And in the past five years, we discovered actually that 90% of us have too much glucose in our system. 90% of us. We used to think that glucose was just something that diabetics had to care about, think about, and regulate. But now we know that every single one of us is experiencing what we call these glucose spikes on a daily basis. And these glucose spikes lead to cravings, mood swings, excessive hunger, poor sleep, infertility, weight gain, inflammation, acne, worsening menopause symptoms, and obviously long-term the development of diseases like type 2 diabetes. So all this to say

that glucose is very important to learn how to manage for each and every one of us. Right, yeah, and we'll get on to glucose spikes in a minute. But first, I'd just like to say, So when we talk about foods, I think we tend to kind of oversimplify a bit and we'll say like, this food has starch, this food has protein and this food has glucose or sugar or whatever. But is it that simple? Is it that each, you know, do we find glucose in one specific kind of food or is it in everything that we eat? So glucose is in most plant foods. So anything that comes from a plant contains glucose because actually the way glucose even appears in the world is through plants.

When plants perform photosynthesis, what they're doing is they're creating glucose. Like, that is how glucose arrives in the world. So plants contain glucose. And glucose can take multiple forms. One is starch. So, for example, if you eat root vegetables or if you eat anything that has been made from seeds. So we're talking, you know, anything that comes from flour, bread, pasta, cakes,

where if you eat actual seeds like rice or quinoa, et cetera, you're getting. starch so you're getting glucose. Now, there's a little bit of starch in all plant foods. So it's not just like, oh, only root vegetables contain starch and then other vegetables don't contain any glucose at all. It exists a little bit everywhere. And the main way that we get a lot of glucose in our system nowadays is actually through table sugar. Because when table sugar is created, what they're doing is they're extracting the glucose and the fructose from plants, so from beets or canes or corn and turning it into that crystallized white powder that we know so well. And that contains 50% glucose.

Do we eat more glucose than we used to? Yes, we eat much more glucose than we used to. We eat much more glucose than we used to. So it's mostly due to the rise of food processing and industrialization. So if you think about what it was like to live, you know, back in prehistoric times, you only got glucose essentially from fruit and root vegetables that you would, you know, find yourself and then cook. Then we moved on to states where in the 1800s, even though people ate a lot of starch, they didn't yet eat any table sugar, which is the extra concentrated,

sort of massive vessel for glucose that we all eat a lot of today. And today, you know, we eat over 100 pounds of sugar per year. year per person. So we eat way more than nature intended us to. If I'm ever craving a snack, it's usually a sweet snack that I'm craving. Why is that? Why is it that we love glucose so much? Because every time we eat something sweet, it activates dopamine in our brain. And dopamine makes us feel pleasure. And this is the same chemical that's created in your brain when you have sex, when you use illegal drugs, when you gamble. I mean, it's the, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, It's the pleasure feeling.

So when you're craving a sweet snack and then you eat the sweet snack, you're going to get this dopamine hit in your brain that says, ooh, Sarah, this was a great move. Because from an evolutionary perspective, it was useful for us to want sweet foods because sweet foods back in the day signaled something that was both energy dense and also safe to eat. It was not poisonous. So we evolved to really like sweetness. But today, I mean, we're not just eating in-season fruit anymore.

at any moment of the day, you can buy something really sweet. So we're overloading our brain with this dopamine. And as a consequence of this, we're actually harming our body with these glucose spikes all the time. And our mitochondria long term shut down. So even though you feel like the sweet snack is giving you energy, it's actually not. It's giving you pleasure, which feels like energy, but ultimately in your body, you're becoming less good at creating energy. Okay, great. Thanks. Now I'd like to go back to glucose spice. that you mentioned earlier. So what exactly is a glucose spike? A glucose spike is a very rapid increase in the concentration of glucose in your bloodstream.

So we're talking over a 1.7 millimol per liter increase for those of us who are interested in the exact numbers. That's how we define it. And glucose spikes happen after meals that we eat that are very high in glucose and not balanced with other things to reduce the spike. And these glucose spikes have intense consequences on our body. What does a glucose spike feel like? Hmm. Depends on the person. But a glucose spike can feel like being energized and feeling alert and awake.

But then what we feel most often is actually the glucose crash that happens after the spike. That crash is very well known, especially when you're a kid, you know, people talk about a sugar crash. That's literally the glucose spike turning into a crash. So here are the most common symptoms that people feel. You can feel hungry. You can feel like you want to eat something sweet, just like you mentioned. You can feel nauseous. You can feel dizzy.

You can feel anxious. You can have heart palpitations. And your mental health can suffer. So me, I actually discovered that glucose spikes were one of the triggers for this mental health condition I had, which is called depersonalization, where I felt kind of, it's like a disassociation, it's a cousin of dissociation. And when I was having a glucose spike, it would be very likely that I would start having this mental health episode. And so it depends on the person, really, but they have negative consequences and we can feel them instantly. You mentioned earlier

that your mitochondria are affected by too much glucose. So what happens in your mitochondria after a glucose spike? Yeah. Okay. So glucose spike is having a lot of the heart. You know, so glucose spike is happening. And glucose only knows one thing. It just knows to go to the mitochondria. Like, that's what it's meant to do. So it goes there. Your mitochondria receive this large influx of glucose way more than they want, way more than they need. So they shut down. The image I like to use is, imagine your job is to put coal onto a fire on a train. And you're putting coal into the fire so that the train pistons can move, and that's your job to keep it moving steadily. If all of a sudden, way too much coal gets delivered to your cabin from which you work, we're talking like

just piles and piles and piles and piles, and they all accumulate in your cabin, you're not able to move anymore, you're not able to shovel the coal into the fire, you're just stuck and you're overwhelmed by all this coal that you don't need. Mitochondria feel the same way when there's too much glucose coming their way. So they shut down. And not only do they do that, they also, at the same time, release these little molecules called free radicals. And free radicals are very damaging. Anything they touch, they damage. So if they touch, for example, your DNA, they can create mutations that can then cause

cancer, for example. If they touch the membrane of your cells, they can break open the cell membrane and, you know, hurt the whole cell and make it turn into a sick cell. And free radicals, we respond to free radicals in our body by increasing inflammation. So every spike increases inflammation in the body. And that's just one of the mechanisms by which glucose spikes harm our health. The second one that I can go into is called glycation. So the more glucose there is in your body, the more this process called glycation happens.

And glycation is simply the meeting of a glucose molecule with another molecule. And since glucose loves running around and everywhere it can in your body, it's bumping into lots of molecules all the time. And every time it bumps into another molecule, it glycates it, which means it slightly modifies, damages it. And glycation is the same thing as what happens when you put a piece of toast in the toaster. It's browning, it's cooking. And on the inside, underneath our skin, we're slowly cooking as well. And this cooking is actually what leads to eventual death. So as a human, you die when you're fully cooked. And with every spike, you're speeding up this cooking process and you're aging internally. Your organs are starting to get damaged,

but also externally and you get more and more wrinkles. So number one, mitochondria and inflammation, number two, glycation and aging. And number three, your body knows that these glucose, spikes are creating these harmful consequences in the body. So it has a way to actually protect you against them. Every time your glucose spikes, as soon as your body detects that, ooh, glucose is really high, it sends out this hormone called insulin into your bloodstream. Insulin comes from the pancreas. And insulin's role is to take glucose and store it away in a place where it can't do any more harm. And insulin stores glucose away in your liver, in your muscles, and in your fat, cells when your liver and your muscles are full. So that's one of the ways that we put on fat.

It's through insulin protecting us against too much glucose flooding around. And so this is a really interesting paradigm shift because when we put on weight, we should actually be thanking our body for protecting us against the inflammation and the aging. It's protecting us against the harm of glucose spikes. Right. I see. And so I just like to go back. So you said that it's linked to the process of aging. Glucos spikes are linked to the process of aging. And So does that mean that if we could flatten out these glucose spikes or reduce the amount that we have them, does that mean we could slow down the rate at which we age? 100%. That seems in a way almost too good to be true.

So we can't reverse aging at the moment, but we can definitely slow down or speed up the rate at which we age. So if you look at two people who are, I don't know, 70 years old, if one has had twice the amount of glucose spikes than the other, that person will, look older externally and be older and more quote unquote damaged or cooked internally. And one thing to remember as well is that, so we spoke about starches and sugars. In starches, there's just glucose. So starches break down into glucose in the body and create glucose spikes. Sugars, on the other hand, they're half glucose and half fructose. And so as they break down into our system, they create both a glucose and a fructose spike.

And it turns out that fructose actually inflamed and gregers. likeates things much faster in the body as well. So if you're eating something sweet and you're experiencing a glucose spike, just know that you're also having a hidden fructose spike that is causing more harm. And that's why one of the hacks I share with my community is if you want to eat a snack, have something savory instead of something sweet. So you avoid the extra fructose spike. Right. I see. So in general, are there any other or kind of rules of thumb about what foods we should be avoiding to prevent glucose spikes? So I actually am not really, my philosophy is not to avoid any foods. My philosophy is to learn how

to combine foods or if foods in a specific order so that you can eat starches and sugars and also at the same time avoid glucose spikes. Because, you know, not eating any starches or any sugars is not very fun. Like I don't want Brussels sprouts for my birthday. I want a big chocolate cake. And so this is really the whole concept of my work is teaching people how to eat sugars and starches, but also whilst avoiding glucose spikes. There's a lot of talk about out there on the internet about sugar being harmful and how we should be adopting new diets that cut out sugar completely. Do you think those sorts of diets are good for you? So yes, cutting out sugar completely is good for your body's health, 100% and your brain as well, 100%. 100%. Sugar has no, there's no benefit to eating sugar, apart from pleasure and fun and social

gatherings. So from a health perspective, it's better to avoid it's 100%, although it can be quite challenging. And personally, if I decide to cut out an entire food category from the way I eat, it makes me sad. And it's really hard and I just create stress. So I much prefer learning how to eat sugar in a way that doesn't create glucose spikes and is less bad for me than cutting it out entirely because that doesn't sound like a lot of fun. And it seems like a lot of the more science-backed, not diets, but kind of, you know, new kind of methods of eating, like reducing your glucose spikes, seem to be a bit less draconian in the rules as well. Yeah, because I think draconian diets, first of all, they're very difficult to maintain. I mean, you might do them for a couple weeks or something,

but even then it's really hard. And then we know that diets don't work. If you really try hard to go on a diet, you're going to gain the weight back. So this glucose science does not teach us a diet. It's not a diet. It's actually a new philosophy. It's habits that you can apply for the rest of your life that are incredibly easy and incredibly powerful to heal physically and mentally while still eating everything you love.

And that's why it's so new and groundbreaking and where people love it so much. Brilliant. And finally, what three things do you think that everyone should know about glucose? Number one, everybody should care about it. 90% of everyone has glucose spikes on a daily basis. So it's not just for diabetics anymore. Number two, that a lot of the symptoms you feel physically and mentally on a daily basis are actually your body speaking to you and telling you, hey, there are glucose spikes happening.

I'm trying to help you. I'm trying to prevent the damage from them, but I need you to change something. So symptoms are really messages from our body. So we shouldn't try to suppress them. We should try to get curious about them and understand what they mean. And then third, that managing your glucose spikes does not mean cutting out sugars and starches from your diet. It can mean things as easy as eating your foods in the right order or adding vinegar to your meal in a very specific smart way. or timing, very light exercise at the right moment, or more things, secrets in the book.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius. That was Jesse and Chelsea. If you want to know more about glucose spikes and how to prevent them, check out her book, Glucose Revolution. Or to hear her tell me about some of her favorite hacks for reducing glucose spikes, head over to Instant Genius Extra, available only on Apple Podcasts. The March issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now. Pick up a copy in store or visit

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