The Dr. Hyman Show - Surprise Hacks To Balance Your Blood Sugar with Jessie Inchauspé

Episode Date: March 23, 2022

This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health, BiOptimizers, and Athletic Greens. Food should be a tool for helping us feel our best. But, most people don’t realize what kind of impact their favorite foods are having on their blood sugar, and subsequently their entire body. Feeling hungry even when you just ate, craving sweets, and dealing with acne, hormonal imbalances, and signs of aging like wrinkles are just a few of the many symptoms of blood sugar swings. When these continue to go unchecked more severe dysfunctions can occur. On today’s episode, I talk to Jessie Inchauspé, also known as the “Glucose Goddess,” all about her tried-and-true hacks for balancing blood sugar and increasing insulin sensitivity. Jessie holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from King's College London and a master’s degree in biochemistry from Georgetown University. Her work at a genetic analysis start-up in Silicon Valley made her realize that, as the key to good health, food habits beat genetics. In her first book, Glucose Revolution, Jessie shares her startling discovery about the essential role of blood sugar in every aspect of our lives, from cravings to fertility, and the surprising hacks to optimize it while still eating the foods we love. This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health, BiOptimizers, and Athletic Greens. Rupa Health is a place where Functional Medicine practitioners can access more than 2,000 specialty lab tests from over 20 labs. You can check out a free, live demo with a Q&A or create an account at RupaHealth.com.   BiOptimizers Magnesium Breakthrough formula contains seven different forms of magnesium, all of which have different functions in the body. Go to magbreakthrough.com/hyman and use code hyman10 at checkout for 10% off your next order.   Right now when you purchase AG1 from Athletic Greens, you will receive 10 free travel packs with your first purchase by visiting athleticgreens.com/hyman. Here are more details from our interview (audio version / Apple Subscriber version):  The spinal injury and mental health issues that started Jessie’s health journey (5:35 / 2:34) Symptoms of blood sugar swings (11:36 / 8:20)  Jessie’s top hacks for stabilizing glucose levels (19:08 / 15:50) Why some people metabolize glucose differently than others (29:07 / 24:35)   Blood sugar, aging, and longevity (33:17 / 27:55)  How glucose affects our energy production (28:35)  Sugar and hormonal imbalances (39:12 / 34:37)  The best and worst forms of starch (43:10 / 37:44) When glucose levels don’t tell the full story (54:30 / 49:51)  Stress and blood sugar (57:09 / 52:31) Follow Jessie on Instagram @glucosegoddess and order her book, Glucose Revolution: The Life-Changing Power of Balancing Your Blood Sugar in the U.S. here and in the UK here. 

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. 90% of us are walking around with these glucose spikes happening in our body without knowing it. Yet we're very familiar with the consequences. The cravings, the fatigue, the mood swings, the weight gain. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Hyman. One of the most important tools I have for helping my patients to optimize their health is testing. And that's why I love Rupa Health and what they're doing. Functional medicine testing can require placing orders with lots of different labs.

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And now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Welcome to The Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman. That's pharmacy with an F, a place for conversations that matter. And if you've ever struggled with your blood sugar, or maybe you just are moody, irritable, and hangry sometimes, or maybe you're gaining weight and you don't know why, this is the podcast for you because we're going to be talking with someone who's delved deep into the world of blood sugar in ways that have only been possible in the last few years with the advent of something called continuous glucose monitoring, which is a very cool technology that allows you to measure your blood sugar in real time and see how you, not somebody else, how you respond to particular foods and what that can teach

you about your health, your biology, and even your brain function. So I have the great pleasure today of having Jesse Inchowski, who is a lay person, but has learned more about blood sugar than probably almost anybody else on the planet through her own body, who's on a mission to translate cutting-edge science into easy tips to help people improve their physical and their mental health. She's the founder of the wildly popular Instagram account, Glucose Goddess, where she teaches life-changing food habits to hundreds of thousands of people. And she holds a bachelor's degree in science from King's College in London,

a master of science degree in biochemistry from Georgetown University. And she's done all sorts of work in genetic startups in Silicon Valley. And she herself had her own struggle with her blood sugar, which she didn't actually realize was causing a whole bunch of symptoms, including mental health issues, which most didn't actually realize was causing a whole bunch of symptoms, including mental health issues, which most people don't think about. In her new book, her first book, The Glucose Revolution, Jessie is sharing her startling discoveries 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 food that we love. I always say you want to eat food that we love and that loves us back. So welcome, Jessie. Thank you, Mark. Thank you for having me. Of course. So listen, we were chatting a little earlier and you were sharing how you got into this because what is a math and biochemistry major actually doing writing a book about health. And you came into this through your

own doorway of mental health issues. So take us through your journey. What was going on for you? How did you figure out that it was a blood sugar that was a problem and what you learned from that? So I was a happy and naive 19-year-old thinking I was invincible. And then a freak accident happened. I was in Hawaii on the island of Maui, and I jumped off a waterfall thinking it would be a fantastic idea. Turns out it wasn't. And one of my vertebraes exploded just by hitting the water. Oh. Yes.

Yes, it was intense. So I had, you know, very difficult surgery and then physical symptoms. I mean, it was a lot of pain, but in the morning feeling good because I felt completely broken. I had no idea what was happening. I felt lost. I felt alone. I didn't understand the signals my body was sending me. So I started a journey to try to figure out how to understand and communicate with my body. And that's actually why I went to grad school

and did biochemistry first, because I wanted to understand the inner workings of the body system. And then I moved to Silicon Valley, worked in the field of genetics. Genetics didn't really offer any answers to me because your genetics, you know, they can help you understand

what diseases you might have a slightly higher risk of getting, but they don't tell you what to do to wake up tomorrow feeling good. No. No. But while I was there, serendipitously, we had this internal research pilot at the company, and they offered five employees to try out a continuous glucose monitor, which is the device that had been usually reserved for diabetics that you wear on the back of your arms. Yeah. And that measure your glucose levels continuously.

And I had a hunch this would be a fantastic idea. So I volunteered and I put the device on and then all of a sudden I could see the inside of my body on my phone. And it was really light bulb moment for me, like in the cartoons when the light bulb turns on above the head. Mark, it was, I could finally speak to my body. I would do something and get a response. I would drink a cappuccino. Sometimes there would be a glucose spike. Sometimes there wouldn't be. I would eat something, spike, eat something else, no spike.

And then what changed the game is when I realized that glucose spikes could trigger these episodes of depersonalization in me. So one day I was just going about my business and I felt this sort of wave of stress, anxiety, and sort of leaving my body come over me. And I checked my glucose levels. And what I saw was the biggest spike I had ever seen because I had just eaten a donut on an empty stomach. How high did it go? It went to 185. What? That's really high, guys. For everybody listening, it should never go over 120. Yeah, it's really really high and i had

you know i was just in the throes of understanding what glucose was what i should be doing but that cemented it for me i was like okay this is this is the solution this is the key this is the root cause that i need to address and so i learned mark how to flatten my glucose curves and as a scientist i delved into all the research. I read all the papers. I had like a million tabs open on my computer. And I discovered all these incredible hacks that I could put in place in my life. Very easy, simple solutions,

like eating my food in the right order, incorporating vinegar, having a savory breakfast, et cetera, that allowed me to stabilize my glucose curves. And as I did this, I healed myself. And not only did I heal the mental health stuff, I also healed things that I didn't even know were a problem. Like all of a sudden, I wasn't tired at 3 p.m. or I didn't even crave donuts anymore. I realized that my body was functioning much, much better this way. So I started sharing it with my friends, my family, they got better. And then they asked me to put it online so they

could share it with more people. And I started the Instagram accounts and then it grew far beyond anything I had ever imagined because I realized 90% of us are walking around with these glucose spikes happening in our body without knowing it. Yet we're very familiar with the consequences, the cravings, the fatigue, the mood swings, the weight gain, and optimizing our glucose levels allows us to reverse all those symptoms. Absolutely. It's so important. Your book is so important because it teaches us really how to reimagine our relationship to our own bodies and actually democratize health information, putting you at the center of your healthcare, not the healthcare system or your doctor, and empowers you with real data in real time to adjust your behavior to

optimize your health, which is revolutionary. This is what we call the whole quantified self-movement that's now emerging, whether it's your Oura Ring or your Eight Sleep Mat or your Apple Watch or Whoop or Fitbit. I mean, these are all technologies that are coming and there's going to be more. You're going to be able to soon plant a sensor in your blood that won't just measure blood sugar, but maybe a thousand different metabolites. And we'll be able to get AI helping us sort through it all and make sense of what to do and tell us what to do and what not to do and what to eat, to sleep better, feel better, make more muscle. I mean, it's going to be quite amazing. And this is just the beginning of this absolute revolution in healthcare. So I want to help you have me break down. You mentioned a few things, but I would really like to have you break down

what the symptoms are that most people are unaware of that are related to swings in blood sugar. Because it's not just high or low, it's these excursions up and down that often cause the most havoc. So kind of walk us through, you're the average person, you're kind of walking around not knowing what the hell's going on in your body, and what kind of things might you experience if your blood sugar is out of whack? Absolutely. So the average person walks around and they feel all these symptoms. So they might feel really hungry even though they just ate 90 minutes ago, or it might be four in the afternoon and they walk by a bakery and they're like, oh my God, I need to eat three cookies right now. or they might feel really tired right now, or they might feel

really tired at 11 a.m. And these are symptoms that often we tend to attribute to like lack of willpower. And then there are the more long-term symptoms like acne starts developing on your face. You might get hormonal imbalances that lead to things like polycystic ovarian syndrome, worsening menopause symptoms, long-term type 2 diabetes, and all of these things we tend to medicate, right? We're like symptom, medication, boom. But actually these symptoms are your body telling you, hey, hello, there's actually glucose spikes happening in here. There's something you can change and heal from within. So in my community, the most common symptoms, as I mentioned, are fatigue, waking up,

not feeling rested, feeling like you need to eat every 90 minutes, you need to snack constantly, and feeling this pull towards sweet foods. And then just having very unsteady energy and feeling tired after meals, feeling tired throughout the day, needing coffee to keep going. Yeah, I mean, those are really the common ones. But there's others. I remember a guy who came to see me who was having incredible panic attacks. And I said, well, tell me about your panic attacks and your anxiety. And of course, in medicine, we typically attribute these to psychological causes.

And we prescribe anxiety medication like Ativan or Valium. And I said, well, tell me what's going on. When do you get it? What happens? And, you know, going to the details of the story. And it turned out, you know, he basically had this big belly and was severely insulin resistant and he ate a very high start sugar diet. And, you know, he would have tons of carbs for breakfast, which is basically the American breakfast is sugar for breakfast. I should, I think we should call it dessert, not breakfast for most people eating muffins, bagels, cereal, which is 75% sugar, pancakes, waffles, French toast, muffins. You know, it's just, it's kind of a sugar Lollapalooza.

And he said, every afternoon, I just, I just get overwhelming panic attacks i start sweating my heart's palpitating i feel like i'm gonna die i can't breathe the world's closing in on me and i said what do you do he says well i drink a can of coke and i feel better so he was a roller coaster glucose it was sugars were up and down. And I'm like, you are hypoglycemic. So even though your sugars can go high, they can go low. And I think what happens is there's an overshoot. Yeah, and for me, it was mental health as well. Yeah, and it creates all these mental health issues, depression, anxiety, palpitations, panic attacks.

And then you mentioned a bunch of things that people aren't even aware of, like infertility or acne. I mean, most people don't think about that. Wrinkles. Of course, diabetes. Wrinkles, right? Wrinkles. Aging. Aging, dementia. Yes. Heart disease, cancer. Fatty liver disease. Fatty liver. Every pretty much age-related disease. In fact, aging itself is often related to sugar issues and to lack of insulin sensitivity, which is what happens when you make a diet that is full of starch and sugar. You get these wild spikes in sugar, but then that causes a spike in insulin

and then sugar crosses, then you need more and more insulin just to keep the sugar balanced. And ultimately that causes a whole cascade of problems that we now know as the fundamental drivers of aging. Yes. And on the topic of aging, one thing that really startled me that I discovered is that every time your glucose levels spike, all the glucose that's rushing into your system,

it's going to bump into other molecules and it's going to do this thing called glycation to the other molecules. And when a molecule is glycated, it's damaged. And glycation leads to us literally cooking from the inside, like a piece of toast in the toaster. That's what happens. And then when we're fully cooked, we die. That's why we die. And so the more glucose spikes in your diet, the faster you age internally, but also externally because it leads to wrinkles. It's mind-blowing. It really is. Yeah, it's true. I remember I was at this longevity conference, the Menla Institute, which is Menla Center,

which is by Robert Thurman, who's a Buddhist scholar. And he had the Dalai Lama there and all these Tibetan scholars, but also Nobel Prize winners and scientists about longevity. And there was Lenny Guarti there from MIT who discovered sirtuins and the role of life extension by activating sirtuins with resveratrol and other compounds. And I said, you know, these master regulators like of aging, how do they get regulated? What screws them up? How does it work? He says, it's sugar.

Sugar is the biggest problem that we have in terms of not allowing these longevity switches to work properly. And so we literally turn off the longevity switch. We should have rapidly accelerate aging when we over consume sugar. And I would say starch as well. I mean, that's just the same as sugar because you can eat a bagel or sugar. It's the same thing. Yeah. And so we end up in this situation where we know it's bad for us and we know we need to avoid glucose spikes, but often people can be a bit lost as to where to begin. Does it mean I should never eat starch and sugar again? That feels very draconian for most people. And so what I've developed are these 10 principles, these food

principles that allow you to keep your glucose levels steady without giving up all the foods you love because personally mark i need a chocolate cake for my birthday i'm not gonna have a brussels sprout low carb no sugar cake like i need chocolate cake this is a non-negotiable part you're a better human than i am but like i love sugar and so when i first um discovered the world of glucose my fasting glucose levels was 95 i was 23 years old and that was high and through my hacks i've lowered it to 79 without giving up all the stuff i love well tell us what do we what do we do i mean all of us are flooded in a sea of sugar and flour i mean the average person in america eats 152 pounds of sugar and flour. I mean, the average person in America eats 152 pounds of sugar and 133 pounds of flour a year. That's about a pound a day per person per year of sugar and

flour, which is insane. How do we deal with it? What are the hacks that you found that help regulate your blood sugar? And then we'll get into some of the surprising things you learned by having this continuous glucose monitor, which is, by the way, available to everybody right now in a new company called Levels, which I'm an advisor and an investor in just transparently. They're actually kind of innovating in this space to help empower people with this information. Absolutely. And anybody using a continuous glucose monitor, try my hacks and you will see the difference in your glucose levels. And anybody who cannot afford a glucose monitor yet, my hacks work even if you don't have a monitor.

That's what's cool. So number one hack that is incredibly easy, that has fantastic evidence supporting it, is eat your food in the right order. So yes, so anybody listening, if you're about to have a meal, look in front of you. Let's say you have some chicken, some broccoli, and some potatoes, okay?

If you eat the elements of this meal in a particular order, you can reduce the glucose spike of the meal by 75%. This means less aging, less inflammation, less weight gain, fewer cravings, etc. The right order is vegetables first, protein and fats second, and starches and sugars last. And so when we do this, when we eat our vegetables first during a meal, the fiber in the vegetables lands in our stomach, then in our upper intestine, coats the walls of our intestine with this viscous mesh, and then any starch or sugars you eat afterwards will be absorbed to a lesser extent in your bloodstream, therefore smaller glucose spike. But you're eating the exact same thing. And this is so cool. And so many people sending messages like, I just simply changed the order in which I ate my

food. I didn't change what I ate and things started changing for me. That's the number one. I often recommend people take something called PGX or polyglycoplex, which is a derivative of cognac root. Cognac is a Japanese tuber, like a root vegetable that is made into noodles. It's actually used a lot in Japanese cooking

and it's very viscous and it absorbs 50 times its weight in water. So if you take some of this powder beforehand or even the capsules, it basically acts like a sponge, absorbs all the water and slows the absorption of everything. So your glucose doesn't spike. Very cool. I mean, this is really super powerful. Another one that people love is vinegar. I don't know if you know about this, Mark. It's like, it's incredible. So the hack is before your meals, take a tall glass of water, like the one I'm holding now. So this is about, you know, twice the size of a regular glass and pour into it one tablespoon of vinegar. It can be

any type of vinegar. My favorite is apple cider vinegar, but you know, white wine vinegar, rice vinegar also work and drink it up to 30 minutes before your meal. And in the studies, the scientists say that the effect of vinegar is almost the same as the effect of medication given to diabetics to reduce glucose spikes. Why? Why does it work? By just doing this, because there's a molecule in vinegar called acetic acid. And acetic acid does two really cool things.

One, it goes into your- Well, that's actually what vinegar is. It's acetic acid and acetic acid does two really cool things one well that's actually what vinegar is it's acetic acid right absolutely right absolutely um there's also water in vinegar right so it's that's one of the molecules in vinegar it's acetic acid so it goes into your stomach and it talks to this enzyme called alpha amylase and alpha amylase's job is to break down starch into glucose and it tells that enzyme hey girly please slow down your roll slow your roll and so that enzyme works slower so the breakdown of starches into glucose happens slower that's number one so slower delivery of glucose into your bloodstream later on number two vinegar the vinegar you take it like a spoonful before you should dilute it in water just to be safe yeah so a spoonful in the studies you take it like a spoonful before you should dilute it in water just to be safe

yeah so a spoonful in the studies you can do one tablespoon um you can do two tablespoons personally one tablespoon is what i use because it's just two tablespoons starts being a lot of vinegar in your glass of water so one tablespoon is what i like and the second thing it does which is incredible is that it goes to your muscles and it says, hey muscles, as soon as glucose gets into the bloodstream, soak it up, store it as glycogen in the muscles. Don't let it float around. And so by these two mechanisms, glucose is broken down at a slower rate in your stomach. And as soon as it arrives in the bloodstream, it gets soaked up. As a result, glucose spike reduced by up to 30%. And this matters because then you don't have the glucose crash. You don't have the cravings. You don't start that

cravings rollercoaster that so many of us are on, yet you're eating the exact same food as before. Amazing. And that's two hacks. So we've got the timing of what you eat when, right? Vegetables, protein, and starch, and then the vinegar before you eat. What else? So if anybody is still having a sweet breakfast, this is a very important hack. Have a savory breakfast. And of course, nobody listening to this podcast ever eats a sweet breakfast because they've been listening to this podcast and they know that we should not have dessert for breakfast. But just in case you haven't heard many of the podcasts, listen up. Just in case this is the first podcast you listen to.

Have a savory breakfast. So in the studies, what they've done is they've taken two groups of people and they've given them two breakfasts, one of two breakfasts, same number of calories. We know calories don't count, but still it's important to mention this. One group had a breakfast that spiked their glucose levels. The other group had a breakfast that kept their glucose levels steady. What happened was in the group that had the spiky breakfast, they got hungry again after two hours, whereas the group that had the steady glucose breakfast didn't get hungry for five hours. So the curve, yeah, of course, the curve of your breakfast really determines how you're going to feel for the rest of the day and whether you're going to feel in control and connected to your body

or whether walking by that bakery is going to give you an irresistible urge to buy all the cookies like it used to be for me. I used to have a Nutella crepe for breakfast every morning growing up, Mark. And by 1030, I was starving. I mean, it was bad. Nutella crepe. Yeah, that'll do it. But I'm recovered now. I'm recovered. And if I really want Nutella crepe, what I do is I have it after lunch or dinner as a dessert and I have some vinegar before. So that's another hack. You know, if you want something sweet. Put vinegar on your cookies? Is that the thing? Yeah, just pour vinegar all over my cookies. I'm not sure that's going to go over very well.

My friends love me when I come to parties. No, so it's having the vinegar in the water before you eat the sweet thing, having the sweet thing after a meal, and also then using your muscles for 10 minutes. So your muscles are really your biggest ally in reducing your glucose spikes. And so what I recommend, it's another hack. After your meals, use your muscles for 10 minutes. biggest ally in reducing your glucose spikes. And so what I recommend, it's another hack. After your meals, use your muscles for 10 minutes. Top favorites include dancing to your three favorite songs really loud in your living room, going for a walk with your dog, doing the dishes, the laundry, whatever. Use your muscles. That way you'll curb the spike and you'll feel better. That's a really important point. I think people people don't realize this but the data is so compelling on what you're saying which is if you

just take a walk after dinner for 15 20 minutes half an hour you will see a dramatic change in your metabolism and your blood sugar absolutely absolutely it's really incredible and this works particularly well to combat the post-meal sleepiness that a lot of us feel if you just use your muscles afterwards, you have all this energy again because you're not experiencing such a big crash. And if you can't go outside and you're just home and you're watching, for example, a TV show after dinner or a movie, people can get really creative. So you could hold a plank in front of your couch while you're watching the movie. You could get some kettlebells and do some bicep curls,

whatever works, whatever floats your boat, but that'll really help your body deal with the glucose coming through. Amazing. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Mark. I'm all about streamlining my daily health routine to be as powerful and yet simple as possible. And that's why I love AG1 from Athletic Greens. Because when it comes to my health, I want it all. I want my gut to function great, my brain to feel sharp, my immune system to be strong, my body to feel energized and able. And being in my line of work, I know that means I need optimal levels of nutrients, which is one scoop of AG1. I get 75 high quality vitamins,

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Again, that's athleticgreens.com forward slash hyman to take ownership over your health and pick up the ultimate daily nutritional insurance. Now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. What else? You've said 10 things. There's a lot more. I know.

I'll give you one more, but then the rest are in my book, Glucose Revolution. One more is putting clothes on your carbs. So what do I mean? Do not let your carbs- Put clothes on your carbs. So what do I mean? Do not let your carbs. Put clothes on your carbs. Uh-huh.

Don't let your carbs. No naked carbs? No naked carbs. No naked carbs. What's a naked carb? Uh-huh. So a naked carb is sugar or starch that you're eating on its own. Naked.

You just eat it naked and it lands naked and it creates a big glucose spike. So to put clothes on your cards, what you do is anytime you eat something sweet or something starchy, you make sure to put some protein, fat or fiber on it. You put some clothes on that. So example, I'm going to take the chocolate cake example. I put Greek yogurt on it if I ever want it in the middle of the day. If you want a piece of sourdough bread, put some avocado on it. Put some butter on it. If you ever want to eat some rice, have some eggs with it, some smoked salmon, some greens that you saute. That's brilliant. I think the idea that we need to not be eating any of this stuff in a way that spikes our blood sugar

is key. And what we're learning and what you learned through measuring your blood sugar for years and tracking everything is how different foods affect you. But the interesting thing is that what might affect you might not affect somebody else and what affects somebody else might not affect you. So can you talk about the differences in glucose metabolism from person to person, depending on their genetics and even their microbiome? Absolutely. So when I started discovering the world of glucose monitoring, I set a few of my friends up with one as well, and we tested the same foods.

So for example, we would eat the same cookie and then compare our glucose spikes. Turns out mine was bigger than other people's. I was like, darn it, I really love cookies. And so I started thinking, you know, what does this mean? Why is my spike so much bigger than my friend Luna's spike? What's going on here? Well, many things could be going on. So as you mentioned, microbiome could be a factor, hydration level, tiredness, how well we had slept the night before, muscle mass, obviously, because your muscles soak up glucose, insulin sensitivity. So you know how metabolically healthy we are. And just many, many more things, the phase of your menstrual cycle,

your stress levels, there's a lot of stuff going on there. So it was really interesting to notice what choices might be better for my glucose levels compared to other people. But I kept coming back to the fact that the science shows that the hacks work in all of us. So if me and my friend who both ate the cookie had both put some clothes on the cookie, let's say, you know, 10 almonds, both of our spikes would have been proportionately smaller than the naked cookie spike. So you have to keep that in mind. These principles work for all of us, but then if you have the opportunity to use a glucose monitor, you might discover much more personalized and in-depth, you know, preferences that your body has. Yeah, you know, Jessie,

I remember reading that Israeli study where they looked at the microbiome and how that uniqueness of each of our ecological community that we live in, which is our gut. That lives in us, yeah. How that actually is so determinant of what happens with our metabolism. And we know from animal studies

that if you take the poop out of a skinny mouse and you put it in a fat mouse, the fat mouse will get skinny. Yeah, or in a diabetic to not diabetic. Yeah, if you take a healthy, metabolically healthy person, which there's not that many of us around anymore, there's about only 12% of us in America that are metabolically healthy.

But if you find a person, good luck, and you transmit their poop into a diabetic, their blood sugar gets better. And I i remember a case uh which i had years ago i think i might have mentioned on the podcast once of a gentleman who had type 2 diabetes we really poorly controlled sugars were well over 200 all the time and we got him down to like 150 but we couldn't just get him all the way normal even on a ketogenic diet and one one day he called me up and he said, Dr. Hyman, I'm having a lot of digestive symptoms. I'm bloated, I'm distended, I'm all these issues. And I said, okay, well, let's do some diagnostic workup, a stool test, but in the meantime, you know, while you're suffering, just try some charcoal to see if

that can absorb some of these sort of bloating and the gas and the toxins, which can cause these symptoms. And he did. And then he called me back and says, Dr. Hammond, I don't know what happened, but my blood sugar went to normal. I don't even understand. And I did understand because the microbiome plays a huge role in our metabolic health and something called metabolic endotoxemia, which means that the toxins produced by bad bugs in the gut when we eat the wrong things

get absorbed and they cause inflammation. The inflammation causes us to be insulin resistant and that makes us more diabetic. I mean, it's just a whole cascade of vicious cycle. And so simply by absorbing the metabolic toxins in his gut from bad bugs, we were able to actually correct his blood sugar. So it's quite fascinating. It's not as simple as we think. It's just, oh, just eat this or don't eat that or exercise or don't exercise. It's really, it's kind of. It's not as simple as we think. It's just, oh, just eat this, don't eat that, or exercise, don't exercise. It's really, it's kind of a personalized story. And I think there are universal principles, like you mentioned. I just want to loop back on something you said before as well, because you talked about

these sort of toast that happens when proteins and sugars in your blood, and you become toast, and you're literally toast. I mean, it's actually true. You're toasting your system. And there's a phenomenon that's called advanced glycation end products. And we measure this when we measure our average blood sugar through hemoglobin A1C, which is just measuring the proteins in hemoglobin getting glommed onto by sugar and forming this like crusty creme brulee, like chicken skin,

that kind of, that phenomena, it's called the Maillard reaction, happens inside your body, not just when you're cooking. And that is one of the hallmarks of aging, is the abnormal proteins that form in the body that gum everything up. And this happens in your brain, it's called type 3 diabetes, it happens in your heart, your organs. It really is the phenomenon that leads to rapid aging and death. And then what's even funnier is that these things are called ages, advanced glycation end products, and they bind to receptors on your cell called rages. So the ages make you rage, literally, and turn on all the inflammatory downstream phenomena that we see as inflammation. So it's such an important thing to understand. And regulating your blood sugar is probably the single most important you can do.

I remember being at Kenya Ranch years ago and there was a cardiologist that came from Harvard and he gave a lecture and he said, you know, if you could take a group of 100-year-old people and you could find a group with clean arteries, they'd have one thing in common. What would that be? They're insulin sensitive, meaning they're very good

at keeping their blood sugar even without a lot of insulin. That's the key to longevity and healthy aging. And not just that, but all these other conditions that you mentioned from acne to infertility to depression to panic attacks to fatigue, energy, insomnia. I mean, night sweats are even a common symptom. Men get night sweats too, and often it's because they have these hypoglycemic spikes and they can wake up with soaked sheets. So really important to get your sugar dialed in. So that's one of the things that happens when

we have a glucose spike. It's the toasting. And maybe I can mention something else that happens when our glucose levels spike. So every cell in your body needs energy to function. You know, your brain cells need energy to think, your eye cells to see, your toe cells to dance all night long. Like every cell in your body is really hungry for energy. And the most easy place they get this energy is through glucose that we eat. And so as you digest a meal and glucose goes into your bloodstream, it heads to your cells to be converted to energy. And the little organelles that do this work are mitochondria. They take glucose, turn it into ATP, which is energy. And so you might think, okay, well, if I need energy, then the more glucose I eat, the more energy I have, right? There must be a

correlation just like that. It turns out that's not the case. If you overwhelm your mitochondria with too much glucose, which is the case when a glucose spike happens, your mitochondria don't get excited. They actually shut down. They're like, whoa, can't deal with all this stuff. Don't know what to do. I'm stressing out. I can't work anymore. Your mitochondria shut down and they get stressed and they release these things called free radicals into your cells. And free radicals, they harm everything that they touch. So if they touch your DNA, they might harm it and create a mutation that could lead to cancer later on. If they touch a cell membrane, they can break the cell membrane and damage the integrity of the cell. And so your body's response to these free radicals is inflammation. And that's one of the ways that

glucose spikes increase inflammation. The problem is in this case, if it becomes chronic inflammation, it's not good. And that is another thing that creates a terrain for chronic diseases. I mean, three out of five people are going to die of an inflammation-based disease. I mean, I don't know if it's three, it's probably a hundred percent. You think? Actually, sure. I mean, unless you get hit by a truck or fall off out of a train or something, I think most of the people die from inflammatory-related conditions. Because all aging itself leads to more inflammation through a whole series of mechanisms, including

your blood sugar, including environmental toxins, including your microbiome, including latent infections, including our unprocessed inflammatory diet, including chronic stress. I mean, all the things that we see around us all the time are all driving this inflammatory process. But sugar is sort of the king, queen, and prince of driving inflammation in your body. And so it's such an important thing. It's why I've been talking about this for decades, because as a doctor, seeing patients and testing this stuff, when no one else was looking at it, it was like, wow, people are messed

up. Like I would do glucose tolerance tests, not on diabetics, but on almost everybody who came in as a screening test for their metabolic health. Because your blood sugar can be perfectly normal and you can still be a mess, right? Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's an important lesson. We've had Dr. Casey Means talk about this on the podcast, talking about how there's patients

who literally have perfectly normal blood sugars, but their insulins are so high that they're keeping their blood sugar normal, and that causes a whole other cascade of problems. Yeah, because I think insulin increases for 10 years before fasting glucose levels increase. Yeah, I mean, the last thing that happens is your fasting glucose going up, right? Yeah.

And the second to last thing is your fasting glucose goes up, but then your glucose after you eat goes up. But that's, again, a late stage phenomena. Earlier stages are high insulin after two hours than fasting and then it's like so we're getting on the train so late in medicine we need to think about how to go upstream to get to the cause yeah for a long time we only thought diabetics should worry about this you know only if you have diabetes should you then think about managing your glucose levels and by the way to manage it just eat better and exercise more i mean come on we need to give people the

hacks mark we need everybody to be using this because it's so easy yeah they eat better people have no clue what that means the other thing i wanted to sort of jump into was hormones right we talked about aging we talked about heart disease but you know one of the real problems with sugar is is screwing up our hormones both for men and women. And can you take us down how that works and what goes wrong and why it's so common to see such hormonal chaos in this country? Absolutely. I think one of the conditions that is becoming more and more prevalent, especially in my community, I'm noticing that the numbers are increasing so much, is polycystic ovarian syndrome. And this is a condition where women stop getting their period, their ovaries become burdened with cysts, they start displaying masculine traits like hair on

the chin, balding, etc. And this is something that often we're told to just medicate, oh, just take the pill and it'll fix it. It turns out actually that polycystic ovarian syndrome is a disease of too much insulin. And we know, yeah. And the way it works is fascinating. So when your body has too much insulin in it, it's not as good as it was before at converting male hormones into female hormones. So you end up with people who have uteruses who have this excess of testosterone in their body. So their female hormones are just not working anymore. Yeah, and they grow beards. Yes.

And they get acne. And you don't get your period anymore, yes. And they lose their hair on their head. So women get bald. You ever see this kind of women with the big round middle and their hair's all thin and looks like they're going bald on top. Yeah, so many, so many. They got the little whiskers going.

It's heartbreaking. It's really from sugar. Mark. Yeah, because they don't know that the reason this is happening is because of too much insulin. And the reason there's too much insulin is because their glucose levels are out of whack. And so what's really empowering, I think, is when women start applying the principles, the science-backed stuff that I share, because they're able to get their period back within months. A few women even got pregnant, even though they had been told they were infertile.

And this is so empowering because we have power. We have power. It starts in our plate. And this is really a message of hope. So anybody listening, this can really benefit you. And I hope you'll find a lot of relief in this information. Yeah. It's not your DNA. It's your dinner. I love that. So here's the deal. In men, the opposite sort of thing happens. So what happens to men, right? What happens to men when they eat too much sugar and starch is they actually produce because they produce way more fat cells and the fat cells have a compound called aromatase which converts testosterone into estrogen and so the men get man boobs and they get soft skin and they lose the hair on their bodies so they become more like

women. So basically, men become more like women, women become more like men. It creates this massive chaos in the hormones. And I just want to reinforce what you're saying because you say glucose. And most people, when they think of glucose, they think of sugar. but you should think of bread or sugar or cornflakes in exactly the same way. In fact, bread is the gold standard for measuring glycemic index, and it's worse than sugar. The score for bread is 100. The score for sugar is 80. So actually, you're better off having the sugar than the bread. I would disagree, Mark, because in the sugar, there's also fructose. And all the things we talked about, you know, the aging, the inflammation,

fructose does it at an even higher rate than glucose alone. That's true. I would argue that if you have a choice between something starchy and something sweet, I would go for the starchy thing. But better even have some vegetables first, then some protein and fat, and then have the starchy thing.

And maybe you won't even want to have the sugary thing in the end. Yeah, I think that's fair. But I also say, if you're going to have starch, have starch that's in forms that are coming in a good package. So for example, I have a Japanese purple sweet potato at night. I love that, which is starch, but it's got full of phytochemicals and fiber and vitamins and minerals. And I eat the skin. So it's really actually a very healthy food. And it's quite different than eating white bread, which is also a starch. So starch is a starch is a starch. It really depends on where it's coming from and how it's metabolized. Even oatmeal versus steel-cut oats, profoundly different. Absolutely. And this is, so what I've been doing in my work is testing all these things on my own body and using a continuous glucose monitor, showing people

the different spikes that happen. So I tested steel-cut oats versus regular oatmeal and the steel-cut has a smaller spike and same for bread. So white bread is far worse than something like sourdough, for example, which is worse than something like very dark pumpernickel bread that's all gooey and feels almost like a cake because it's so rich of fiber. Yeah, from Germany. So it's always a spectrum, right? You have to think within a category. There's different types of bread, different types of potatoes, different types of starch, and you can always make a choice to see a bit better. And you can always add some fiber to it and some vinegar and go for a walk after. So basically throw some Metamucil and some vinegar on your food and you're good, right?

Pretty much. Yeah. Sounds delicious. So tell us some of the surprising things, Jesse, that you learned about your own body and in researching this about what you thought was okay to eat but actually wasn't or what you thought wasn't okay to eat but actually maybe was okay well as i mentioned you know i used to have donuts for breakfast so i really got a cold shower in terms of nothing sweet first thing in the morning because first thing in the morning when your body is completely fasted, your glucose levels will respond incredibly fast to anything that you ingest. So I realized that if I wanted to eat

something sweet, for example, a donut, I should never, ever, ever eat it on an empty stomach. I should always eat it after a meal. Then in terms of other surprising things, I mean, oatmeal was a big one because they even say oatmeal is for diabetics. I mean, there's all this information that's very confusing. Yeah. Rice cakes. Oh my God. Oatmeal is not a health food. No, it's not.

Rice cakes. This is crazy. Brown rice cakes. How could they be bad? I tested brown rice versus white rice. Literally no difference. Well, what if you put like a nut butter on top? Then it's perfect.

That sounds really gross, but it probably works. I love it. That's my favorite thing. I get the rice cakes and I put like a macadamia butter. Oh, on the rice cake. I thought you meant put the nut butter on actual rice, like warm rice. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You get a rice cake and you put on the nut butter and it's kind of good.

Then that works. Yeah. Then that works. Yeah. Then that works. So all the breakfast things are really, in this country, so geared toward extremely high levels of starch and sugar. And in fact- Yeah, fruit juice is terrible, right? And I think people need to realize that the most important thing they need to do when they eat in the morning is eat plenty of protein, fat, and fiber.

Yes. Because those are the magic tricks to actually keep your blood sugar normal plenty of protein, fat, and fiber. Yes. Because those are the magic tricks to actually keep your blood sugar normal. Protein, fat, and fiber. And you have to learn what foods have protein, fat, and fiber. It's a little bit of an education because, you know, as most people may not know, but it actually is the key to success. And you're basically saying eat protein, fat, and fiber before you eat any starch or sugar.

And that will mitigate all the results. Exactly. Something else that was very surprising was oat milk creates a big glucose spike because it's no more oatmeal lattes the oat milk lattes no no way huh people got really sad when i posted that test i was like i'm sorry i know you guys love your oat milk but it's just it's just a big bowl of glucose it's dessert have it as dessert don't have it first thing in the morning on an empty stomach. And then fruit was actually quite surprising to me, Mark, because I learned that fruit have been bred for centuries to be extra sweet and extra juicy and contain lots of glucose and fructose. So especially grapes. Yeah, grapes are the worst. You eat 20 grapes, super big glucose spike. So I

learned that anytime I have fruit always put clothes on it i'm french so grapes and cheese i actually just posted that test yesterday on my instagram glucose goddess if anybody wants to see it if you add cheese to the grapes the glucose spike is smaller because you're adding you know this but it's still there it's still there but it's still there yeah so have it as it as dessert. Yeah. Pineapple, bananas, definitely always put some clothes on those. And I've really completely changed the way I ate, Mark. I mean, now for breakfast, I have leftovers. This morning I have leftover green beans and cauliflower and two eggs.

I don't have cravings anymore. So dinner for breakfast. Dinner for breakfast. Dinner for breakfast. I feel better than I ever have. And I'm older than I ever have. I feel so good. I don't have any cravings. I have energy throughout the day. I don't even drink coffee anymore because I have so much energy just naturally. I mean, I sleep amazingly. It's very

powerful. That's amazing. So you basically have learned how to hack. Now, what other foods you thought were bad for you that actually weren't so bad? Well, there was this whole thing about fat is bad for you. Fat makes you fat. Fat's not good. And I learned that actually that's not the case. What drives heart disease the most is fructose in your liver, creating low-density LDL. And that fat is actually your friend. And so I started putting way more avocado and avocado oils and olive oil and good fats like that, eating more fish. And that really helped stabilize my glucose levels. Other foods that I thought were bad

that were actually good. I think it was mostly the other way around. It was lots of foods I thought were good that were actually bad. What about yourself? What did you discover? Yeah, fruit, right? Yeah. I think fruit, you have to be careful with fruit because it depends on the fruit. It was lots of foods I thought were good that were actually bad. What about yourself? What did you discover? Fruit.

Fruit, right? Yeah. I think fruit, you have to be careful with fruit because it depends on the fruit, depends on how sweet it is, how it was bread, the kind of fruit. When you go get a wild fruit, they're very sweet, but they're very small. And I think- Oh, dried fruit is another big one. Oh, dried fruit's terrible.

Yeah. Terrible, terrible, terrible one oh dried fruit's terrible yeah dried fruit's like candy you know it is like candy and now what i do you know when i want something fruity i'll have one of your shakes um the you know the berries with nut butter and lots of nuts in them chia seeds almond milk like that kind of stuff and that makes for a very satisfying fruity a little snack but that contains all this extra protein and fat and fiber to minimize the spike. Yeah, that's one of my favorite things, I call it a fat shake.

So you basically take nuts of any kind, throw in a bunch of nuts like almonds, walnuts. You can take pumpkin seeds, chia seeds, flax seeds, hemp seeds, and then throw in some berries. Frozen berries. Frozen berries. Frozen berries. I put in cranberries in there.

Maybe throw some lemon in. Maybe I'll throw a couple of tablespoons of nut butter sometimes to make it creamier. And you put in some non-sweetened macadamia milk. I hope macadamia milk is not bad because I use that a lot. I got to check that out. Because you were telling me that's like oat milk. I'm like, oh boy. It comes from nuts, so it's fine.

That's good. Okay. And you blend it up and you can throw in greens in there. You can throw an avocado in there. I throw, you can throw in- Put some cacao nibs on top. Oh yeah, cacao nibs are good.

So you can make a really yummy smoothie that's basically not from processed powders, but actually from whole foods. I have that recipe in my book, Ultra Simple Diet. No, sorry, the 10-Day Detox Diet, which has that recipe in it. And I think- You can add some protein powder too. You can add some protein powder.

And I think, you know, particularly in terms of muscle mass, it's really important, and the science is so clear on this that we need high quality protein in the morning particularly to load up build muscle synthesis need about 30 grams and it has to be high quality protein which has to include amino acids that are found primarily in meat or animal products now if you're a vegan you have to figure out how to get those extra amino acids you have to supply amino acid powders and add them in because if you don't have leucine, which is very low in plant proteins, you can't trigger protein synthesis. In other words, building muscle is critical. And you look at, I mean, not judgmentally here, but if you look at

most vegans, they tend to lose a lot of muscle mass. And the longer they've been on a vegan diet, the worse their muscle loss is. And, oh, they're thin, they look good, their weight's great, but no, they're actually, can be metabolically unhealthy. In fact, they can get what we call a toffee, which is thin on the outside, fat on the inside, or metabolically obese normal weight, we call it, or otherwise called skinny fat. Most commonly known as skinny fat. Yeah, you look skinny, but you're really fat. And that actually is just as dangerous as actually being overweight in terms of risk for heart attacks, diabetes, strokes, all the same risk factor. So I think people need to understand that you've got

to look under the hood. You've got to look at what's going on. So maybe you're a vegan and you're like, okay, well, how am I going to get protein in the morning? I don't want to eat meat or I have a whey protein shake, but what can I do? Well, you kind of have to look at your own biology. And I encourage people to look at their continuous glucose monitoring. I encourage people to measure fasting insulin, even measuring a two-hour post-meal insulin level, which most doctors will not order, but you can try to get them to order it. If not, you can just maybe order it yourself. There are now companies where you can order stuff yourself, but I think it's really important. You can go to IHOP and have breakfast. Yeah, you said that in your podcast with Casey or your Instagram live. You said, just eat something that has a bunch of glucose in it.

Eat a bunch of rice. And then two hours later, go get your insulin and your glucose listed and you'll know. Yeah, yeah. So that's really important. So the tips you gave are so important. You know, the sequencing of food. I mean, even if you have a glass of wine. I mean, the worst thing in restaurants, right?

Because what do they do? You want to drink? Here's a bread basket. You know, it's like the worst possible thing you could actually do for your health. If you think about it, if you're a restaurant owner and you want people to order a bunch of stuff at your restaurant, that's what you do because you give them bread. They eat the bread first, big glucose spike. 90 minutes later, they're crashing. So they're super hungry and they want to order dessert. I mean, it's brilliant. Of course.

It's brilliant. Of course. Exactly. Exactly. And I wonder if they know that or it's just sort of a habit, but it definitely, it's a sure way to get people to order more food. Absolutely. And I think drinking wine, the timing of the food, when you eat what matters.

It's not just about time-restricted eating, but it's even the sequence of eating in a meal. It's actually the combinations of the food that you eat. Like you said, don't eat naked carbs. That's a really important concept. The vinegar thing is a very cool hack. The walking after eating is really important. Getting your muscles to work and suck up the glucose, super important.

Were there any other surprises or things you learned as part of your investigations, your scientific sort of diving into your own biology? Maybe we can talk a little bit about alcohol because I think this is one of the places where context is very important to think about the fact that glucose is not everything. So if you just have a glucose monitor and you drink two bottles of wine, your glucose levels will stay steady. But, and they might even decrease actually, because the alcohol is interfering with your liver's job to release glucose into the bloodstream.

But the issue is you might think, oh, well, my glucose levels are steady. This must mean that this food is good for me. And on the completely opposite end of that spectrum, I discovered that when I exercised, I sometimes saw a glucose spike. Yeah. So if I was just looking at everything from the glucose lens, I would think, okay, wine, good for me, exercise, bad for me. Sounds like a great plan. How do I get on that health plan? Let's see, a bottle of wine and skip the exercise.

Okay. No? Perfect. Well, then you'll have steady glucose levels, but you're going to get severely sick. And I realized, okay, there's some instances in which it's important to look beyond glucose. So in the case of alcohol, yes, it keeps your glucose level steady because it's hurting your liver. That's not a reason to drink alcohol. Similarly, when you exercise, you might see a glucose spike because your liver is releasing all this glucose so that your mitochondria can make energy. But the downsides of the glucose spikes, so the toasting, the inflammation, et cetera, are actually counteracted by all the positive sides of exercise.

So in the balance, it's a positive effect on the body. So I learned about nuance. You know, it's a positive effect on the body. So I learned about nuance. I became very important. And it's very interesting when you start diving into it, but you definitely need context if you wear a glucose monitor for the first time. You need to have some information to make sure you understand these pitfalls. It's interesting. I had the same experience. I had a good protein shake, my blood sugar. I had my continuous glucose monitor on. It was like maybe went up to 90 after my protein shake in the morning. I thought, I'm going to go play tennis. And I really worked out hard. I had a great tennis game.

And then I checked my glucose. It's going to be really good. I checked it. And I was like, holy crap, it's 145. And I texted Casey. Anyway, I was like, what's up with this? He's like, yeah, yeah. Well, that's normal. Because when you exercise, you increase cortisol, you increase your blood sugar, increase adrenaline, you actually release glycogen from your muscles. So yes, when you're running from the tiger, you want to release a lot of glucose so you can fuel your muscles. But the body doesn't really know that there's tennis. It just knows that you're running because you're chasing a tiger or you're being chased by a tiger. Yeah. On the topic of being chased by a tiger, I also saw a massive glucose spike after I gave a presentation to the whole company when I was working in Silicon Valley.

And I was quite stressed out. And after the presentation, I checked my glucose levels and I just huge spike to 200, but very short and rapid spike. And that was because my body was preparing for me to run far away and fast from the tiger. So released all this glucose into my bloodstream. And it was really cool to just be able to see what was happening and to understand inner workings. And of course it got me just incredibly curious. And that's how this whole journey started. Well, that's an important point you're making, that stress alone causes you to have imbalanced blood sugar. And stress alone will release cortisol, which then causes you to increase your glucose levels

and to become diabetic and to become more insulin resistant. So short-term spikes of cortisol are great. You need them to wake up in the morning, go deal with any kind of urgently stressful situation, but it's the chronic low-level stress and unmitigated, unremitting stress that actually causes us to have these metabolic problems down the road. So stress actually makes you gain weight. Yeah. And poor sleep as well, Mark. So I discovered, I used to have a cappuccino every morning. And I discovered that on the days where I was rested, the cappuccino wouldn't create a big spike. But then on the days where I was tired, the cappuccino would create a much bigger spike in my body. So I did the research and I found out that when you're not rested, your body has a harder time dealing with

any influx of glucose into your system. So what I found out is that the days when I'm feeling tired, to put all the chances on my side to not create a big glucose rollercoaster, always savory breakfast, like non-negotiable. And then I try to get in 10 minutes of high intensity exercise very soon after I wake up. So jumping jacks, whatever, put on a YouTube video, like 10 minute HIIT class.

And this helps my body become more insulin sensitive. And so I don't create this big spike from that cappuccino. Because what's so awful and so vicious is that when you're tired, you really crave sugar even more because you're feeling like it's going to give you energy. But the problem is that same sugar that you're going to eat will create a bigger spike than usual, putting you on the cravings rollercoaster, and then you're going to crave even more sugar. For sure. So anybody tired, use the hacks even more. It's even more important.

I remember that. You know, when I worked in the emergency room and I wouldn't sleep all night, I would, I mean, I literally would like go to the 11 o'clock at night shift. I would have a quadruple espresso, a half a pint of ice cream, and a giant chocolate chip cookie. No. And then I would go to work. No. Okay, so you were throwing shade on my Nutella crepe, but you were doing some pretty naughty

stuff too. I was jacking myself to get through the night so I could actually stay up all night and see patients. And then I would kind of crash at three in the morning, or two or three in the morning, and I'd go to the McDonald's and I'd get an apple strud, and I would kind of crash three in the morning or two or three in the morning. I'd go to the McDonald's and I'd get an apple strudel and a bunch of French fries because it was the only thing open in the hospital in the middle of the night. And, and I, you know, I think the data is so clear that when you are sleep deprived and they've done this with healthy young volunteers, your ghrelin levels or ghrelin levels go up, which makes you

hungry. And the hormone that keeps you having a break on your appetite called PYY goes down. And so you end up in this double whammy where the thing that's supposed to make you stop eating is shut off. And the thing that makes you want to eat more and more goes up just from lack of sleep. Yeah. And it's vicious because you feel like the sweet stuff is giving you energy. But then as we know, it's actually harming the long-term ability of your mitochondria to make energy. So you think that the apple strudel is giving you energy, it's giving you pleasure, but long-term it's harming you. Amazing. So to close here, what does the typical day in the life of a glucose goddess look like?

Okay. So let's see. Morning leftovers for breakfast. So as I mentioned for this morning, it was leftover cauliflower and green beans and onion. And then I had some eggs. Then what often happens to me, Mark, is that as I'm going for my walk in the morning, I'll see something that looks really tasty. Usually it's chocolate based. And so what I do now is that I buy the tasty thing, but I don't eat it right then I tell myself I'll have it for dessert after my lunch. So before lunch, tall glass of water with some vinegar in it. Lunch is usually lots of greens, some nice protein, you know, I eat everything. So it's probably going to be some meat or chicken or fish. And then I have the little sweet thing that

I bought for myself. And then I go for a walk, or I work out or I do some exercise, whatever it is, or I dance around, do my laundry. And then for the evening, if I have friends over, what I'll do is I'll do a big plate of vegetables that people can munch on while I'm cooking. So, you know, in France, we have this thing called crudités, which is raw vegetables, carrots, cucumbers, maybe with some hummus, avocado. So people munch on that. And then for dinner, I'll serve more vegetables, some protein and fats that people will eat in second, and then some starches.

So actually, your purple Japanese potato really got me inspired. So I'll do that one next time. And people know to eat that last, for sure. And then I get everybody up. We go for a walk around the block. So when people get back, they have a lot of energy and they help me clean up the kitchen. It's as simple as that. There you go. That's so beautiful. And I think you're a great example. And it's important for people listening to understand that everybody's different. So you're basically a healthy, thin, young woman. But if you are not metabolically resilient, right, you've learned how

to balance your blood sugar in the context of overall metabolic health. But if you're very metabolically unhealthy, which accounts for 88% of Americans and everybody's sort of in that somewhere on the spectrum, from mild to really severe to type 2 diabetes, you might not actually able to be able to eat some of the things that you're talking about yet. So the key is you can become metabolically resilient, but you have to go through that process first of making your muscles smarter, your insulin receptor smarter, lowering inflammation, fixing your microbiome, fixing your liver. And it's a lot of stuff to do, but it's easy to do. All you have to do is follow a very simple low sugar starch diet

and i i've written a book called the 10-day detox diet which essentially is that it's anti-inflammatory detoxifying glucose balancing and we we we had a woman who was on insulin for 10 years and three days she was off her insulin. In a month, she lowered, or three months, she lowered her A1C, which is average blood sugar from 11, which is stupid high, like it's dangerously high, to normal, 5.5. In just three months of her eating real food that balanced her blood sugar.

So do you think everybody should try one of these continuous glucose monitors? I'm divided, to be honest, because first of all, they're expensive right now. I think they're very, very, very interesting. I think if you can afford it, 100%. If you can't afford it, use my hacks because they'll get you a long way to balancing your glucose levels without necessarily needing one. But if you can, yes, it's life-changing to be able to speak to your

body and see what's going on on the inside. It's very motivating. It opens a door of curiosity and excitement, and then you can see the hacks in action. It's very cool. I mean, it changed my life, so of course. Yeah, I think people can do it. I think some people need to do it long-term, but sometimes you can just try for two weeks or four weeks and start to really tune in to what's happening on the inside. It's just the beginning of this year of quantified self. I think you've been a great example of someone who's really taken the bull by the horns and actually looked at what's going on and changed your own health and your own understanding

of biology. And you're sharing that knowledge in your incredible new book, which is out now. Everybody should check it out. Glucose Revolution, The Life-Changing Power of Balancing Your Blood Sugar. And it's absolutely true. I've been on this train for a long time. Thank you for joining it and helping to lead it now so I can go take a vacation. And just keep it up because this is so great information. Everybody should check out her work at Glucose Goddess Instagram and get the book. And anybody listening who's struggled with their blood sugar, who've learned how to balance it, who've learned about themselves,

even through the CGM monitoring, share with us on our comments. We'd love to hear from you. Share this with your friends and family because 88% of them are metabolically unhealthy. I know they need this. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and we'll see you next time on The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into The Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I want to tell you about something else I'm doing, which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter. And in it, I share my favorite stuff from foods to supplements to gadgets to tools to

enhance your health. It's all the cool stuff that I use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health. And I'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter. I'll only send it to you once a week on Fridays. Nothing else, I promise. And all you do is go to drhyman.com forward slash pics to sign up. That's drhyman.com forward slash pics, P-I-C-K-S, and sign up for the newsletter,

and I'll share with you my favorite stuff that I use to enhance my health and get healthier and better and live younger longer. Hi, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. healthier and better and live younger, longer. professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.