The Dr. Hyman Show - How To Reduce Cravings, Balance Blood Sugar, Improve Energy, And Feel Better with Jessie Inchauspé
Episode Date: May 17, 2023This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health, Cozy Earth, ButcherBox, and AirDoctor. Blood sugar is one aspect of our biology that has major implications for how well we feel and function on a daily ...basis. And I have some good news for you: Balancing your blood sugar doesn’t have to be difficult or even unpleasant, and you’ll start to notice the benefits right away. On today’s episode, I’m excited to talk to Jessie Inchauspé, also known as the “Glucose Goddess,” all about simple, attainable hacks to help you successfully manage your blood sugar throughout the day. Jessie Inchauspé is a French biochemist and author. She is on a mission to translate cutting-edge science into easy tips to help people improve their physical and mental health. In her first book, Glucose Revolution, a number one international bestseller, she shared her startling discovery about the essential role of blood sugar in every aspect of our lives and the surprising hacks to optimize it. In The Glucose Goddess Method, she helps us put them into practice with a 4-week plan. Jessie is the founder of the wildly popular Instagram account @GlucoseGoddess, where she teaches over one million people about transformative food habits. This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health, Cozy Earth, ButcherBox, and AirDoctor. Rupa Health is a place where Functional Medicine practitioners can access more than 2,000 specialty lab tests from over 35 labs. You can check out a free, live demo with a Q&A or create an account at RupaHealth.com. Right now, get 40% off your Cozy Earth sheets. Just head over to cozyearth.com and use code MARK40. When you sign up today, ButcherBox will send you two pounds of 100% grass-fed, grass-finished beef free in your first box plus $20 off. To receive this offer, go to ButcherBox.com/farmacy. I’ve teamed up with the makers of AirDoctor to give my listeners the best deal yet on this amazing filtration system. Right now, if you go to drhyman.com/filter you can get the AirDoctor filter for $329. Here are more details from our interview (audio version / Apple Subscriber version): How Jessie’s mental health struggles led her to study glucose (6:37 / 3:50) Symptoms of imbalanced blood sugar (9:01 / 6:46) Normal vs optimal blood sugar levels (13:14 / 11:00) How to sequence your food intake for steady blood sugar levels (22:24 / 17:50) Blood sugar-balancing breakfasts (26:22 / 21:56) Jessie’s Glucose Goddess Method pilot experiment (30:34 / 25:49) Savory breakfast principles (35:50 / 31:08) Vinegar and blood sugar levels (40:06 / 35:26) How fiber supports glucose levels (45:51 / 41:05) Why you should move after eating (48:52 / 44:12) Get a copy of The Glucose Goddess Method: A 4-Week Guide to Cutting Cravings, Getting Your Energy Back, and Feeling Amazing.
Transcript
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Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy.
The scientists show that if you eat the elements of a meal in a specific order,
you can reduce the glucose spike of that meal by up to 75%, okay?
Eating the same meal, which is mind-boggling.
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Now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy.
Welcome to The Doctor's Pharmacy podcast.
I'm Dr. Hyman and that's Pharmacy Within an Epic Place for Conversations of Matter. If you've ever had blood sugar issues or felt
swings in your energy and blood sugar, you're going to love this podcast because it's about
how to fix your blood sugar, which is basically something I've been talking about for decades,
a blood sugar solution, ultra-metabolism back in 2005 and the 10-Day Detox Diet and really
how we actually have to get to the root cause
of so much of what's wrong with us today in the world, which is insulin resistance,
prediabetes, poor metabolic health, which by the way, affects now 93.2% of the population,
which is a lot of people in America and increasingly around the world. So we have
to get to the bottom of how to create good metabolic health. And we have somebody who knows exactly how to do that today on our podcast, Jessie Enchape, who's a,
I don't know if I pronounced that right, but it's a French chemist and author. She's, you might've
heard about her. Her sort of handle is the glucose goddess. She's on a mission to translate cutting
edge science into easy practical tips to help people
improve their physical mental health.
In her first book, which we talked about on the podcast
before, Glucose Revolution,
she talked all about how blood sugar
regulates every aspect of our lives
and how we can hack our biology to balance our blood sugar
and feel better, prevent so many of their chronic diseases.
Her book was translated into 41 languages.
It's been a huge success.
And she's created something called the Glucose Goddess Method.
And using the insights she's garnered from her own research on herself and from doing
research we'll talk about with a larger population, she helps put all these ideas into a practical four-week plan that we're
going to talk about. She's a founder of the wildly popular Instagram account at Glucose Goddess,
where she teaches over 1 million people about transformative food habits. She holds a bachelor's
in science and math from King's College in London and a master's in science and biochemistry from
Georgetown University. Welcome, Jessie. Thank you, Mark, for having me back. It's a joy. And you know, what you said is so true. Like you've been pioneering this, this topic for such a long
time. And yeah, thank you for all your amazing work. You were such a big inspiration of mine
when I first got into this. I was like, wow, the blood sugar solution was really the beginning.
So thank you for that. Yeah, amazing. Well, before I even had gray hair, I was talking about this. It's been a while.
But we still need to talk about it clearly, you know, clearly it's still an issue.
It's quite amazing to me. 90% of people who have prediabetes, which is probably about one out of two Americans, according to the conventional criteria, which I think are not strict enough, have prediabetes, one in two Americans, and 90%
don't know they have it. And I would say the real data is probably more around the 93% who have it,
both people who are overweight, which is 75% of the population, but also those who are thin,
but we call metabolically unhealthy or metabolically obese, normal weight, or skinny
fat or toe feet, thin on the outside outside fat on the inside so you can be
thin but metabolically unhealthy and all what we're talking about today matters to every single
person listening because the biggest killers on the planet heart disease cancer diabetes dementia
all are regulated by or caused by or worsened by problems with your blood sugar and with your insulin levels.
So we're going to get deep into that today.
I'm very curious about what happened once you wrote this book
and what you discovered and what the reception was
and what people found as they started to track their own blood sugars.
Because, you know, you did this as self-experiment on yourself
where you tracked your blood sugar, everything you ate,
you tracked what happened. You know, you're not a an obese unhealthy person but
you still learn so much about yourself what was what was it you learned so much from writing this
book and from getting the feedback that you got for it well you know mark and the reason i got
into this was simply because my mental health was super out of whack and balancing my glucose levels
helped me create a baseline of
health in my own body, in my own brain. And then I started realizing all these studies showing,
as you said, that this matters for everybody, you know, for cravings, for sleep, for hormonal health,
for long-term prevention of Alzheimer's. I mean, like it's really, really important. And so when
I wrote Glucose Revolution last year, I was trying to give everybody everything I had seen in the scientific studies on the topic of glucose levels.
And so it contained these 10 hacks about simple tools you can put in place in your daily food habits to balance your glucose levels and feel better.
And so the reception was very good.
But I started getting a message from people, Mark, in my Instagram, my DMs.
A lot of my readers sent me this very peculiar message asking me to move in with them.
They were like, Jesse, they were like, I understand the science.
I think I'm having glucose spikes because they were recognizing all the symptoms in themselves.
And they wanted to do the hacks, you know, but they wanted me to move in with them and actually help them do it. Because a lot of us know, Mark, that we have to eat better, exercise more, but really
what's difficult sometimes is just actually getting started. And so, you know, I pondered,
can I move in with all these million people? No, I can't. So what can I do to address this issue?
And so that's where this new concept for this new book came out.
So the glucose goddess method.
I took the four most important principles, in my opinion, to start steadying your glucose levels.
And I turned it into a very simple four-week plan.
And again, you know, I really want to help people just start.
Because that is often the
big friction point.
You know, people have bought my first book and they wanted to do everything, but they
didn't know how to start.
They didn't have like the recipes.
They didn't have the step-by-step guide.
And so this method really is like me moving in with you and guiding you for four weeks
to study blood sugar and to incorporate four fundamental
principles to help your body and help your mind. Amazing. That's so great. You know, I want to sort
of get into deep into the method and what you learn and what can practically help people. But
before we do, I want to dive a little bit into how would you know if your blood sugar is out
of balance, if you're having spikes, what are the symptoms? You alluded to that with, you know if your blood sugar's out of balance if you're having spikes what are the
symptoms you alluded to that with you know a person who wanted you to move in with them but
what what is actually going on in the body and what is the symptoms people experience that can
give them a clue that oh maybe this is me and i should pay more attention okay anybody listening
i'm going to ask you a few questions. Do you ever experience cravings throughout the day? Now, most people are going to answer yes or no. Never. Are you ever more tired than you wish you were? Do you need coffee mid-morning, mid-afternoon? Do you go to sleep, but you wake up and you're just lethargic. Those two are, to me, the most obvious symptoms that you might have blood sugar
imbalances. And that's just the beginning mark because then, you know, studies are showing us
the links between glucose spikes and brain fog. So when your glucose is on a roller coaster,
the information between the neurons in your brain goes more slowly and that can be felt as brain fog. Blood sugar spikes increase inflammation in the body and that can lead to psoriasis,
eczema, rosacea, inflammation in your joints, you know, it can impact your hormones.
So maybe you're going through the menopause and your symptoms are quite difficult.
Maybe you're, you know, younger than that, but your period is all over the place.
Maybe you're trying to have a baby and you can't because you're not ovulating anymore.
So, I mean, you know, those symptoms often point to the fact that you should probably figure out
if your glucose levels are steady or not. And then long-term, you know, as you know, as you said,
you know, cancer, heart disease, disease type 2 diabetes those are very clear
signs that there's something going on in your glucose levels and to me mark you know balancing
your glucose levels is like laying the foundation in your house it is without a doubt the number one
place to start without steady glucose levels you can't really do much and in conclusion i would say
if you're listening to this and you think you could feel better than you currently do, then 100% figure out if your glucose levels are unbalanced
and start there.
And then you can start layering on more stuff.
You know, for me, I started with glucose, but then I added so many more things.
Exercise, sleeping in a dark, cool room, going to therapy, emotional processing, you know.
But if I didn't have that you know, but if I didn't
have that baseline of steady glucose, I didn't even have the energy or the brain clarity to go
after those next steps. Yeah. Yeah. That's very beautiful. I think, you know, people think, oh,
well, I don't have diabetes or I don't have pre-diabetes. Like why, why should I pay attention?
Like, you know, why does it matter? And why is it important for everybody?
Well, because even if you don't have diabetes or prediabetes,
don't you want to prevent it?
You know, that argument kind of upsets me
because I even hear, you know, medical professionals say,
well, you know, they don't have prediabetes.
They shouldn't care.
I'm like, yeah, but how do you think you get prediabetes?
So whether you're in the 1 billion people in the world who have typed you with prediabetes,
or if you want to put it into remission, or if you just want to avoid getting it,
it's very important to learn these principles.
To me, these are things that everybody needs to know,
because today our food landscape is very difficult to navigate.
It's full of starches and sugars everywhere.
We're pretty lost as to how to eat and what to navigate. You know, it's full of starches and sugars everywhere. We're pretty lost as to how to
eat and what to do. And so we need these principles to guide us to make sure we don't end up with
metabolic syndrome, with full-blown type 2 diabetes. So everybody should care, everybody,
whether you want to feel better today or tomorrow. Well, I agree. And I would argue that most people
are on the spectrum. It's not just like one day you get diabetes or one day you
get prior diabetes. There's a whole continuum of changes that happen over decades, starting even
when you're a little kid that actually put you in poor metabolic health. And so catching that
earlier than later is really important because the changes that we see, we see fatty streaks in
the arteries of like kids from cholesterol deposits that are often related to blood sugar imbalances, right? Because kids are eating all
this sugar and processed food. So it's not something you have to wait until you have a
problem. The other thing I kind of want to dive in with you a little bit about is what's normal?
Because when you go to the doctor, you get blood tests you check your blood sugar your a1c maybe you're lucky that you don't check that never check your insulin which
is probably the most important blood test to check on your levels of blood sugar balance
what should the normal level be what should the optimal level be because normal you know is up to
126 but that's not you know know, normal. What are optimal?
What's the optimal levels of sugar before and after eating? Well, listen, fasting wise, it appears
that you should be under 85 milligrams per deciliter fasting. I don't know what your opinion
on that is, but definitely the 100, the 100 cutoff is way too high. And, you know, if you're at 99, you're not okay. You should be like,
okay, I'm like one point away from prediabetes. You should be having a look. But the studies
point to the fact that after 85, problems start happening and symptoms start worsening. Do you
agree with that number, 85? Absolutely. You know, based on a large Israeli study,
they looked at glucose levels and cardiovascular risk. And they looked at, after about 85, it was a linear progression to increasing risk of heart attacks and death.
So it didn't start when you were 100 or 110 or 126. It started like at 85. So that means at a
fasting level, you probably should be between 70 and 85. I think that's probably the range that I
would agree with. What about after you eat?
Well, so the guidelines say that you're normal if after eating your glucose levels doesn't spike above 140 milligrams per deciliter.
But again, that's really, really high.
And studies in people without diabetes are showing that actually you should probably be striving for an increase of less than 30 milligrams per deciliter after eating.
And that cutoff of the 30 milligrams
is what I call a spike. So if you look at my Instagram graphs, you'll see like that's the
line at which I say, okay, you're going into the red. Now, obviously, you know, the objective is
not to just try to flatten your glucose curve at all costs and have a perfectly flat glucose curve,
because that could be achieved by drinking a lot of wine,
eating a lot of butter.
You know, there's things that keeps your glucose level steady that are not necessarily good.
So the concept is how do we reduce the variability wherever you are, even if you have type 2
diabetes and you're spiking, you know, super, super high after eating.
How do you get that down?
How do you just reduce the, you know, the spike height and the drop height and the drop depth of your
glucose roller coaster?
That's really the point.
Yeah.
Well, I think, obviously, we know in medicine, if you're over 140 after a glucose tolerance
test, that's considered type 2 diabetes or 126 after two hours of drinking like two coca-colas but you know what's
really striking as a doctor and i've seen this and i don't know if you've come up with this in your
in your work but people can have perfect blood sugars and still be wildly metabolically unhealthy
and they can have perfect perfect even never high never over 85 fasting, never over 110 after a glucose load, even drinking two Coca-Colas,
equivalent of glucose, they can have perfect, perfect sugar and be like really almost ready
for having a heart attack. And that's because insulin will keep blood sugar normal until
it can't. So by the time you actually see your blood sugar start to go to
90, 100, 110, your insulin has been working overtime to try to keep your sugar normal.
And that insulin is not benign. That insulin makes you store fat. It makes you hungry. It
causes inflammation. By secondary mechanisms, it's just got a whole cascade of horrible effects.
And this phenomenon of hyperinsulinemia or high insulin levels is an epidemic. It's just got a whole cascade of horrible effects. And this phenomenon
of hyperinsulinemia or high insulin levels is an epidemic. It's completely undiagnosed for the most
part in America, except for a few doctors like me who are doing functional medicine or looking at
insulin levels. It's quite striking. So I wonder what your perspective is on that. Because if
we're just measuring continuous glucose measurements for the glucose monitor,
and we're not measuring insulin, could we be glucose monitor. We're not measuring insulin.
Could we be falsely assured that there's no problem when in fact we're in big trouble?
Well, 100%.
I mean, the day that somebody comes out with an insulin monitor,
glucose monitors are dead, right?
We're just using glucose because it's a good proxy for insulin.
I agree.
Yeah.
It's not, you know, again, like because your glucose levels could be going up. I mean,
there's like so many confounding variables. What I mean is that your glucose levels could be
perfectly fine, but your insulin is going totally crazy. And we know from the science that your
insulin levels start to rise 10 years before your glucose levels start to rise. So glucose monitors
and you're looking at your glucose spikes is very imperfect. That being said,
that's what I base my work on because that's what we have right now. And I think people really want
to be able to see something visually, but yes, it's just a really bad proxy. Exactly. So when
you start seeing already wild swings or changes in your blood sugar, it goes high after eating
or high fasting. You already know you're in trouble. It's like, it's not the first stage, right?
It's not the first stage.
It's like a later stage.
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How do you know how far you are along the insulin resistance spectrum?
I mean, listen, really the best test to do is to do fasting insulin, as you said. You know,
the OMA-IR ratio is also really good. But to me, I think
people also should strive to check in with themselves and just be like, okay, am I having
cravings? Am I chronically fatigued? Do I have brain fog? Am I hungry all the time or two hours
after eating? Do I have any sort of symptom that I wish wasn't there? And more often than not,
you can link things back to this blood sugar or insulin level imbalance.
So really, to me, it even comes down to just how happy you feel.
Like if you think you could feel better than you currently do, if you think you could wake up with a little bit more joy and feeling a bit better in your body, balancing your
glucose levels is a non-negotiable.
And I like using the image, Mark, of like a plane.
So imagine your body is a plane and you're in charge of
flying the plane. So keeping it healthy, but you have no idea how the plane works. So you're like
in the cockpit and you're clueless. You're like, oh my God, how do I fly this thing? How do I keep
my body, my brain healthy? Well, learning to balance your glucose levels is like learning about
the most important lever in the cockpit. like if you know how to use this
lever you can more or less keep the plane in the air and not crash yeah
that's how I see that's how I see glucose management because once you
balance your glucose levels so many things fall into place of course it's
not everything but it's a damn important place to start it's great so one of
these you talked about it I think is really important,
I think there's a lot of research on this.
It's not just your experience or what you've gleaned from your study that you did,
but what you eat when matters.
So food sequencing has a big impact on your blood sugar.
So if you eat certain things first or second, even if it's the same food,
you swap out like let's say eating red first versus like
your chicken first, it's going to have a profound difference on your blood sugar. Can you talk about
food sequencing, what it is and how it impacts blood sugar levels?
Oh yeah, absolutely. So the first study that came out on this topic was quite fascinating.
They showed, the scientists showed that if you eat the elements of a meal in a specific order, you can reduce the glucose
spike of that meal by up to 75%.
Okay.
Eating the same meal, which is mind boggling.
And so the correct order is veggies first, then proteins and fats, then starches and
sugars.
And in my opinion, you know, because I'm here to try to make things as
easy as possible for people to start and pick up on, the most important thing to remember is try
to have your veggies first and your carbs last. Like if you mix the proteins and the fats in the
middle, like it's not a huge deal, but the veggies first thing is incredibly powerful.
It really impacts your hunger levels. It makes you feel so much fuller for longer and reduces
cravings after a
meal. And the reason this works, Mark, is because the veggies contain fiber. And fiber, when it
lands first in your stomach, has time to create that protective mesh onto the walls of your
intestine and prevent essentially too many glucose molecules from then coming through into your
bloodstream. It just makes that gut lining healthier and less porous.
So that's a really wonderful hack to start with. It doesn't require you to change where you're
eating, which is very, very cool. And you can start seeing the benefits. And so then, you know,
the next hack or the next principle is going to be easier to apply because you're going to feel
better and it becomes this virtuous cycle. And so, you know food sequencing is so important i think protein fat
veggies fiber are all basically antidotes to sugar and starch to remember that and when you're having
any sugar and starch like for example you have a you have an apple have it with a spoon of almond
butter or peanut butter right that that actually slows the glucose surge in your body.
Let's talk about fruit quickly, Mark. I want to say something interesting that I learned about fruit. So the fruit that we see today, people often think, oh, you know, I bought this piece
of whole fruit at the supermarket, therefore it's natural, therefore it's good for me.
Well, it turns out that a lot of the fruit that we eat today is actually, you know, the consequence
of thousands of years of human intervention in
breeding to make them extra sweet, extra juicy, extra easy to eat and contain less fiber. So,
you know, if you compare like a banana today to an ancestral banana, the ancestral banana is tiny.
It's full of seeds, full of fiber, not very sweet. Yeah. So the fruit today, you know,
is super extra sweet. So we have to remember that,
that it's been bred to be almost like a piece of dessert. But because of the fiber,
it's still fine. The problem happens when you get rid of the fiber and you juice it all.
Yeah, that's right. It's like, you know, fruit has its own matrix. Plus also fruit has a lot
of fructose, which doesn't actually raise your blood sugar. So that's another tricky thing you
could be drinking, like having agave syrup and other kinds
of pure fructose and actually your blood sugar won't go up but you'll be driving fat into your
liver causing fatty liver insulin resistance and that's another limitation right of focusing
only on glucose because you forget that piece but what's cool about fructose is that because it's
always hand in hand in food um glucose because it makes sucrose.
When you learn to balance your glucose levels, naturally also the fructose reduces as a consequence
because it's always balanced the glucose in sweet foods.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Very true.
So when you wrote your first book, The Glucose Revolution, what were the things you learned
from your readers about how they could impact their
blood sugar and keep it in balance? Well, what people told me the most was that changing their
breakfast changed their entire life. So going from a sweet, starchy breakfast, you know, granola,
muesli, cereal that they thought was healthy, to what I call a savory breakfast, you know, granola, muesli, cereal that they thought was healthy to what I call a savory
breakfast, which is essentially just a breakfast that's not dessert, right? Yeah, dessert for
breakfast. Exactly. Which is a complete fabrication and invention. You know, we didn't
used to have dessert for breakfast. We used to have whatever, meats and potatoes or whatever
we ate the rest of the time. The concept that breakfast should be sweet is an invention of the food industry. And it's very smart because,
you know, sugary breakfast foods are very cheap and they're very addictive. So switching back to
what we used to do, which is a savory breakfast, changed people's experience of themselves and of
their lives so deeply. So if you're somebody who's had a sweet breakfast your
whole life, you don't even know what it feels like to feel more like yourself and to not be
controlled, you know, by the swings of glucose. So people really reported to me that the savory
breakfast was a cornerstone of them starting to feel better. Yeah, that's huge. I used to go to
this hotel all the time in New York that had a lot of Japanese
business folks in there and they had a Japanese breakfast slayed out and it was amazing. Basically,
you'll get grilled salmon, miso soup, pickled vegetables, brown rice. It was like the best
breakfast. It was a savory breakfast. And then the other countries like the Middle East,
they have shashuka and all kinds of things which are more savory breakfast. And I think those are
way better for us because they don't cause this huge spike in the morning, which is the worst
thing we could possibly do for our health. In fact, in terms of longevity, on a fasted state,
having sugar is the worst thing you can do or anything that turns to sugar like a muffin or a bagel or
french toast or pancakes and having protein and fat which is often in a savory breakfast
is the opposite it actually helps you build muscle and actually improve
the process of refeeding which is when you activate all these secondary pathways for
muscle protein synthesis and reducing inflammation and for actually increasing
stem cell production, all kinds of amazing stuff that happens just as a result of having the right
breakfast. Yes. And on that topic, you know, when you're having breakfast, when you're fasted
and your system is really empty, actually, if you have sugar, then you're going to create a very,
very big spike because of the emptiness of your system. And so when people ask, you know, is intimate fasting good for glucose levels? It's like, yes, but how you break your fast is going
to be very important. So it's not just a matter of... I think nobody talks about that.
Yeah. Because it's all, you know, all this stuff about, oh, just fast a bunch and you'll be fine.
It's like, okay, fasting is fine. But if then you break your fast with a fruit smoothie,
you're in trouble because your body is going to be suffering all the consequences of the
big spike.
So fasting is fine, but breaking your fast is very important to be doing it in a savory
fashion, protein and fat, as you said.
So important.
And I think people don't understand the importance of actually breaking the fast or the refeeding
process when it comes to fasting.
Fasting is only part of the story.
The refeeding is what activates all these secondary mechanisms
that help you actually extend your life.
So it's actually kind of a mistake to think it's intermittent fasting.
It's both the intermittent fasting or time-restricted eating
and what you eat right after.
Interesting. Interesting.
Interesting.
So the refeeding process is what activates the pathways.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
For muscle protein synthesis, for stem cell production, for repair and healing.
It's quite interesting.
Yeah.
So refeeding is such a key part.
And then you kind of come upon that naturally just by doing the work you've done.
So I wanted to talk to you about what happened
when you wrote your new book, The Glucose Goddess Method,
which is out now and we should definitely get a copy.
You did some research when writing that book.
You conducted a four-week study with about 2,700 people
from 110 countries, which is impressive.
I don't even know if I can name 110 countries,
to test your method
in a pilot experiment. So what's the glucose goddess method and what were the results from
that pilot experiment that you did? So as I was writing it, you know, Mark, and the reason I wrote
it is because my community and my readers were asking for it. And being a scientist, I couldn't
resist the idea of actually, you know, getting some survey data from people,
some self-reported survey data to see how the method impacted them. So I put together, you know,
an early version of the glucose goddess method, which at that point was just a PDF, your black
and white PDF with like some wanky pictures of the recipes from my kitchen. It was, it was not
pretty, but it was the method. And I recruited almost
3,000 people from my Instagram, people who wanted to apply the hacks, people who really wanted to
see change in their lives, but who had not been able to start before because they were lacking
the guidance and the motivation. So I sent them the PDF and we went through the four weeks together.
And so week one, we looked at savory breakfasts. So everybody in the experiment started having a savory breakfast
instead of a sweet one. In most cases, then in week two, we continued the savory breakfast and
we added in a new hack, which is a vinegar drink before you have something starchy or sweet. Week three, we continued the breakfast,
the vinegar drink once a day, and we added a veggie starter to one of our meals a day.
So that's just a big plate of veggies at the beginning of your meal. And then finally in
week four, we layered in movement. So 10 minutes of movement once a day after a meal. And this
could be, you know, just walking, it could
be cleaning your home, it could be ice skating or whatever you wanted. And the rest of the time,
apart from these four hacks, people could do whatever they wanted. They went about their day
normally, they ate what they usually ate, they drank what they usually drank. So that's really
important. And so at the end, I got, I sent everybody a survey of how they did, how their symptoms improved.
And here are the results I got.
And I'll read out the numbers because they're really quite remarkable.
And it was very easy for people to do this.
It was not super highly restrictive.
It was really, to me, it's like the on a ramp to steady glucose.
So after the four weeks, here are the results.
90% of participants were less hungry.
89% reduced their cravings. 77% had more energy. 67% said they were happier. 58%
were sleeping better. 58% of people who were struggling with their mental health said they saw improvements,
46% of people with skin problems saw improvements, 41% of people with diabetes improved it, and
finally 35% of people who had hormonal issues, PCOS, etc., improved their hormonal health.
And my favorite stat of them all i think is that 99 of people
said they would continue doing these hacks as part of their daily lives so it was quite
remarkable and to me really encouraging because that means you can start and doesn't have to be
super hard yeah these are just four simple things, right? Eat a savory breakfast,
have a little vinegar, eat veggie curry meal and walk for 10 minutes after you eat.
I know it's pretty simple. It's simple, but if you're able to actually do it,
then it can change things so much. And it sounds simple. It's like, Oh, that's, that's too simple.
Like whatever. No, actually doing that for four weeks consistently can transform how you feel
and put you on a new path for your health.
And I want to touch on weight loss, you know,
because to me, this is not, you know,
I'm not, this is not a diet.
The glucose gratis method is not like,
it's not a diet.
The point is, the number one point is not losing weight.
But throughout this method,
38% of people lost weight without even trying,
right? Without counting calories, without doing any of that kind of stuff. And so that's key,
because as you mentioned at the beginning of the episode, you know, people with type 2 diabetes,
they could be, yeah, sure, they could have a lot of fat in their body, but also they could not,
right? So weight and health, there's a correlation there, but losing weight is not the number one
thing you need to do for health. You need to fix some underlying issues. That's really the important thing.
That's so powerful. You know, when people think it's complicated to fix this, it's really not.
I mean, I think people, people, um, overcomplicate are so overcomplicated. And I, you know, talked
about the same principles for years and people follow them
and they see amazing results and uh the the data you share was really staggering obviously it
wasn't a double blind randomized controlled trial no it was self-reported data but it's pretty
impressive uh data as we call an observational trial and when you implement these behaviors
um it changes your biology very quickly it doesn't't take a long time. It's only four weeks,
right? So let's break it down a little bit on each step. So savory breakfast, what does that mean?
Why is it so important? What are your favorite savory breakfast recipes? Tell us
actually how we do this. Okay. So the principles for your savory breakfast are very easy. It's
number one, base it around protein.
And when people think breakfast protein,
they're like, oh my God, do I have to eat eggs every day?
What a hassle.
No, you can eat eggs.
I love eggs, but you can have any type of protein.
So maybe you have some leftover grilled salmon
from your dinner last night.
Maybe you have some turkey.
Maybe you have some eggs.
Maybe you have like a nice yogurt, maybe you have
protein powder in a smoothie. Actually, there's a recipe in the bookmark that's inspired by one of
your old school smoothie recipes from back in the blood sugar solution days. Yeah, because that was
one of my favorite ones. Yeah. So that's a really one of my favorite recipes in the book and there are 30 recipes per week to inspire
you to actually get started but my other favorite breakfast recipe I think is called a happy halloumi
so it's just spinach and grilled halloumi some chili super easy and I'm quite a lazy person when
it comes to cooking and I understand that in order to actually make
these changes, it needs to be really simple. So all the recipes are six ingredients or less. They
take 10 to 15 minutes to make maximum. Really, it's not like a complicated cookbook where you
have to grocery shop for six hours and do a whole feast. These are recipes that you're only going to
have to look at once and then you'll know how to do them they're so simple that's the point i want to teach people really easy easy steps so that's week one that's
savory breakfast what's your favorite savory breakfast mark i mean i i love shishuka it's one
of my favorite which is essentially a kind of middle eastern dish with like tomatoes and spices
and so yummy and then you put the eggs in
i could poach them and cook them in the oven and it comes out all like hot and steamy i love i love
that um i also love uh you know i like an avocado tomato fresh tomato avocados cut up with olive oil
on them and like a bunch of eggs uh sometimes, you know, I'll do like a whole
kernel rye bread with like tomato, a little mayo and like kind of cooked eggs, like fried eggs on
top with salt and pepper, maybe a little spice sauce, just really, really yummy, yummy stuff.
So I typically have that. I also, you know, have a shake often, which is a protein-based shake using Goat Whey, which I find really
effective for getting the amount of protein I need to create muscle protein synthesis.
As you get older, you get anabolic resistance where it's hard to build muscle.
So I make sure I get a good dose there, but that's my favorite stuff.
And it changes everything. When you, when you, um, on a fasted state,
have a savory or protein breakfast with fat and veggies,
your whole day is different. Your energy is different.
Your cravings are different. You want different stuff. Um,
your brain is clear. You don't go through these crashes in the morning.
We're around 10, 11 o'clock. You're looking for something sweet or,
you know, your energy crashes.
So you're kind of in this virtuous cycle when you do that.
And it's such an easy thing to do.
And it's also biologically so sound.
I mean, it's actually how to optimize our biological system.
So that's my favorite.
And to your point about your favorite recipes, I hope that people, you know, open the method
and they find these recipes that become their staples, because that's the best.
That's the best outcome that you find three,
four recipes that you love that you can just keep coming back to that are really, really easy.
It's about creating those habits and just making sure that becomes part of your life. And so
savory breakfast is protein, fat, fiber, if you can. And then importantly, you can have starches
for taste, right? But they shouldn't be the center of your breakfast and then finally and probably most importantly nothing sweet except whole fruit if you want for taste
that is the equation for the savory breakfast that's going to really change how you feel and
that's week one and eating the fruit at the end right not at the beginning yep if you can yeah
that's great that's even better yeah you start food, you're not going to get into trouble. So tell us about the vinegar,
because there's so much talk about vinegar and apple cider vinegar and why it's great for you.
And I think, what is the science about this? Is there any science? Is it just a kind of a
folklore, natural medicine kind of recommendation? When should you consume it? What kind should you have?
You know, how do you incorporate vinegar? So talk about vinegar, because it's sort of a weird one.
It's like, what do we vinegar? Okay, I get the veggies, I get the exercise, but like vinegar
is kind of a weird one. I know it is kind of a weird one. And when I first came across the studies,
I also was quite surprised because even though vinegar has been, you know, culturally around for
a very long time, it was like, does it really have this deep of an impact on our
glucose levels?
Well, interestingly, there are a good amount of clinical trials on adding just one tablespoon
of vinegar once a day, either in the morning or before a meal.
And we see significant impact on glucose spike and insulin release.
And so scientists were like, how is this happening? Like, why is this just, you know, this common food? What is it
actually doing? Well, it turns out that vinegar contains acetic acid and acetic acid does two
really cool things. One, it acts on our alpha amylase enzyme, which is the one that's in charge of breaking down
starches into glucose.
And it slows down the action of alpha amylase, therefore slows down how quickly glucose molecules
are arriving in your bloodstream.
And second, yes, acetic acid goes to your muscles and tells your muscles to make glycogen
faster and more abundantly than usual.
So soaking up glucose from the bloodstream and turning it to glycogen.
And so those two very simple things mean that if you have a vinegar drink
before your meal of the day that's highest in starches and sugars,
maybe you're having pasta for dinner, maybe you're having like a cookie in the afternoon.
If you have this, you're going to be able to still get all the pleasure from the carbs
with less of an impact and less creation of that cravings rollercoaster. Because the problem
when we eat something sweet, we do it because it gives us pleasure. It gives us dopamine in the
brain. But then inadvertently, we often then kick off that blood sugar rollercoaster for the rest
of the day. And so vinegar is one small tip that you can add that
can help you counteract that. And so in week two of the method, I teach people lots of different
ways of having it in water, in tea, in mocktails, as dressings, to try to add that ingredient in.
So you have that tool in your toolbox for when you need it. So the vinegar basically inhibits the
ability of the mouth to digest the sugars and starches. Alpha amylase is inhibited.
Yes.
Right.
So in the mouth, you have enzymes as well as your gut, and it inhibits that alpha amylase,
which is very fascinating.
So you kind of have to take it before you eat.
Before.
Yes, before you eat.
Ideally, in the studies, it's about 20 minutes before you eat.
But also, it seems that acetic acid might actually just slow down gastric emptying. So just
slow down how quickly food goes from stomach to intestine. So it has all these different pathways
that it activates. And overall in the studies, it shows a reduction in glucose spikes of up to 30%
and a reduction in insulin secretion of up to 20%. So it's pretty powerful for just one tablespoon
of this cheap thing most of us have
in our kitchen yeah and it doesn't have to be just apple cider yeah it can be any type wine vinegar
white vinegar yep actually i'm really liking white vinegar these days i love acv and apple cider
vinegar but the white vinegar is kind of like it has a different uh texture to it which i'm quite
enjoying today but yeah any vinegar works.
And you can also have it as a dressing on your food.
And white vinegar is great because white vinegar, actually, you can use it to have a burnt pot.
My mother taught me this.
You put white vinegar in the pot and you boil it on the stove and the vinegar just gets all the burnt stuff off the pot.
Oh, cool.
That's amazing.
I'll have to try that.
It's great.
Yeah, it's great.
And it's been used for centuries. You know, in the 18th century,
in the 18th century, Mark, they used to give vinegar teas to people with type 1 diabetes.
So we've known culturally that vinegar is something that can be used for, yeah, for diabetes.
And, you know, in countries like Iran, apple cider vinegar has been made for just generations and generations. And people know it as a health promoting ingredient. But only now
today do we actually understand the mechanism. And that's what I love so much about these hacks,
too, is that, yes, today we have the modern science evidence for explaining how they work,
but actually, culturally, they've been around for a very long time.
Incredible.
Yeah, vinegar has been around for a while.
And should you take it like a C-tail, so before every meal, or just if you're having a carbohydrate
meal?
You do it once a day.
The most effective time to take it would be before a high-carb meal.
So that's the best time to take it.
But otherwise, even if you take it, for example, first thing in the morning, some studies show that just
taking it in the morning also has a long-term impact. So any time is fine. And in the method,
as long as you have one tablespoon a day, you do it whenever, but the most effective time is before
a high carb meal. So if I want to have my favorite chocolate cake, that's a good time to have it.
So I'm in Italy right now. So if I wanted to have a little pasta, I would just have my favorite chocolate cake that's a good time to have it so I'm in Italy right now so if I wanted to have a little pasta I would just have like a teaspoon of vinegar I came
in some water you could even have so in Italy you know they have antipasti which is again like
culturally the veggies first kind of tradition yeah and so put some vinegar on there and you're
taking off two hacks in one and you're doing the glucose goddess method perfectly from Italy there
you go there your veggie starter is the next fourth one.
So it's really the fiber that has the biggest impact from the veggie.
That's why you use that, right?
Yeah, so fiber is remarkable.
And we don't get nearly as much fiber as we need to get.
And so in week three of the method, we do something very simple.
We add a plate of vegetables to the beginning of one of our meals.
So most people do that before lunch or
before dinner instead of before breakfast, because that's a lot of veggies in the morning.
And so by doing this, you're really harnessing the power of the fiber in the veggies. And fiber is,
she's a superwoman. Like she's so wonderful, amazing, and we need more of her in our lives.
And she does a few amazing things first of all she is
going to coat the upper part of your intestine and as i said prevent too many glucose molecules
from coming through to your bloodstream too quickly and second fiber feeds your gut bacteria
which is also very very important and healthy and by having it by having the veggies at the beginning of the meal,
that's when you're going to be able to get the most power out of them.
And the antipasti is a really good example of that being already culturally
something we've been doing for a long time.
And I'm French.
And in France, we have crudités,
which is raw veggies at the beginning of a meal.
Again, you know, we've been doing this.
People have known this for a long time, but we've lost touch with these very key, straightforward
principles that are really important to helping our health.
So week three, a veggie starter once a day.
And there are no studies on exactly the right amount to have.
From my experience, it seems that if your veggie starter makes up about 30% of your
meal, that's a really good thing to aim for.
And the veggies can be raw, they can be cooked, they can be dressed, for example, with a vinegar
dressing as well to, you know, take off two hacks in one.
I have lots of wonderful recipes in the book, like my favorite French asparagus recipe,
my mom's slow cooked leeks. We have crispy kale. We have tomatoes with yogurt dressing, like lots
of simple six ingredient or less kind of thing. And so that's week three. And at that point,
you're doing the savory breakfast, the vinegar, the veggie starter. This is where most of the participants
in the study told me that everything started to change really profoundly. When you get to the end
of that second week and you start the veggie starter, you feel like a completely new person.
And again, it wasn't hard because you could do whatever you wanted the rest of the time.
You just added these principles like gentle giants and your glucose slowly steadied,
inflammation goes down, hormones rebalance, you're less hungry, you sleep better. It's
really transformative. And I'm so excited that it's been so well received. So yeah.
Well, it's great. You make such complicated science into these practical hacks and tips
that everybody can use that are not that complicated and people
can understand them and and make them as regular habits which i really love um the last the last
bit was was moving after you eat and this is really interesting because um people often eat
dinner and then they go sit on the couch and watch tv right it's absolutely the worst thing you could do um and and my grandfather was was from a family who had lots of heart attacks in
their 50s bypasses heart attacks all kinds of stuff he didn't really get it until he was in
his 80s and he got some angina then and what was fascinating was that he he was deaf so he was a
physical laborer most of his life,
throwing newspapers on, the New York Times truck.
But at night after dinner, he always liked to feed the alley cats who were in New York City.
And he would go out with scraps of food, and he would find the alley cats.
And he would just walk the streets of New York after dinner.
And he was super thin and healthy and was doing handstands at 80 years old.
So I think that moving thing is
a thing. And now we have the science behind it. So can you talk about the science behind why
moving after eating is such a critical thing to do? Yes. And again, I love that story. And I love
cats. So I was thinking maybe I should do that when I'm 80 and go feed all the alley cats. I'm
probably going to end up that way, to be perfectly honest. So listen, movement, we all know we should exercise more. We all know that exercise is
good for us, but when is the best time to do it and what is the best way to start?
So from the studies, just 10 minutes of walking or of light movement after a meal can help reduce
the glucose spike of your meal significantly. And why is that? Because every cell in your body uses glucose for energy.
Okay.
And that also goes for your muscles.
Your muscles, when they contract, they need energy to do so.
And the first place they will look is in your bloodstream for extra glucose.
They can use and burn and contract.
And so we can use this to our advantage.
And so here's the hack. 10 minutes
of movement after one meal a day within about 90 minutes of the end of your meal. So you don't have
to get up and immediately do a bunch of pushups. You can wait a little bit. 90 minutes is when the
glucose spike will reach its maximum. And so you want to move and use your muscles before that. So
you can capture some of that extra glucose and lower the spike.
Now, what can you do?
Okay, so you can walk, feed the alley cats.
We love that.
You can also do even simpler stuff to get started.
For example, if you're in the habit of sitting on your couch after dinner, you can still
do that.
But as you're sitting on the couch, how about you start doing some calf raises?
So you push up onto the balls of your feet up and down.
You do that for 10 minutes.
That activates a muscle in your calf called the soleus muscle, which is surprisingly good
at soaking up glucose from your bloodstream.
And that's a muscle we use for walking.
So again, this walking connection.
You can also grab like a big bottle of water, do some bicep curls while you're watching Netflix.
Of course, you can like clean your apartment,
do the dishes, do the laundry.
You can also do intense stuff.
You can go ice skating, whatever floats your boats.
But those 10 minutes are going to be so powerful
to help your body use some of that fuel you just ate.
And most of us give our body too much fuel and that's
where the problems start happening. And so your muscles really become your greatest allies in
your journey to steady glucose. So that's the hack. Week four, 10 minutes of movement, whatever
you want. And by the end of it all, you have these four very simple yet profoundly transformative new habits in your
day to day. And then you're a new person and you can go and go after your dreams and follow your
passion and do things you've always wanted to do and be really proud of yourself. I love that.
And that's such a simple set of things that I think people should follow just from listening to this. They should definitely get your book, which is out now.
It's called The Glucose Goddess Method, A Four-Week Guide to Cutting Cravings,
Getting Your Energy Back and Feeling Amazing. Is there anything else you want people to know
that you've learned in this process of being the glucose goddess before we go?
Yes, I think I want to say something. And this I want to share this
because for me, it was just the beginning of my healing. So after I broke my back, and I had all
these mental health issues for almost a decade, I was super lost. And I was confused about what I
needed to do to feel good in the morning, I felt like my body was this black box, I felt like my
body was almost like an enemy, you know, because I couldn't understand it. I didn't know how to fix
it. And I felt like it was working against me. And I was getting all this brain fog. And I was
just like, why are you doing this to me body. And then as I learned about glucose in the science,
I got an insight, which is that the symptoms that I had been feeling for all these years,
they were actually messages.
They were actually my body trying so hard to communicate with me.
That brain fog, that exhaustion, those pimples, you know, that was my body's language.
Trying to be like, Jesse, SOS, glucose spikes, help.
So next time, and even, you know, the fat
gain on our body, often your body puts on fat because it's trying to protect you and it's trying
to keep you alive, right? The more fat you're able to put on, the longer you'll be protected against
type 2 diabetes. So we just have to switch a little bit how we think about it all. Your body
is trying to save you. Your body is trying to keep you alive symptoms are messages and i hope that you know on this journey of steady glucose you can
get to where i got which is realizing my body is my partner and creating a connection again a
friendship you know between me and my body and i have a cookie but i go for a walk afterwards so
we have like we have an agreement i think you have to walk four miles to work off one chocolate chip cookie though.
Not 10 minutes.
No, not 10 minutes, but we can put in place these, you know,
these easy principles that help us reconnect with our body and create more of a
partnership instead of this black box thing.
Thank you for what you do, Jesse.
This is such important work and you make it so
simple and clear for people you kind of learn the hard way yourself you've translated that into your
life's work it's just beautiful to see um thank you for being on the podcast all of you who are
listening if you love this podcast please share with your friends and family on social media
leave comments help you learn to regulate your blood sugar? Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
And we'll see you next week on The Doctor's Pharmacy.
Hey, everybody.
It's Dr. Hyman.
Thanks for tuning into The Doctor's Pharmacy.
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I hope you enjoyed this week's episode.
Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only.
This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical
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This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other
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If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine
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