How to control blood sugar spikes | Jessie Inchauspé (Glucose Goddess) and Dr Sarah Berry

[Music] welcome to zoe science and nutrition where world leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health [Music] biochemist jessie and chelsea heads into work one morning at a genetics lab in california during the morning meeting management offers staff the chance to self-test a new medical device jessie accepts unusual sure but not entirely out of the ordinary where she worked but jesse couldn't have known this device would take her on a journey of discovery to reshape her health and help countless others do the same the device was a continuous blood sugar monitor and it was this combined with her academic background and a remarkable willingness to use herself as a lab rat that led her to a realization much of the food she was eating was creating havoc with her blood sugar she should stop worrying about calories and start understanding how her body responded to the food she ate in today's episode i'm joined by jesse and dr sarah berry who has carried out dozens of clinical trials looking at blood sugar responses to different meals together we will explore how blood sugar impacts our health we'll also discover jesse's simple hacks to control blood sugar spikes and crashes and find out the real reason why breakfast might be the most important meal of the day for your health jesse and sarah thank you for joining me today and why don't we start with our usual quick fire round of questions from our listeners so sarah do blood sugar spikes and dips matter for our long-term health yes if you've had a diet high in sugar and you're in midlife can you reverse the damage partially could i react very differently to you to cereal for example for breakfast absolutely by about tenfold difference possibly amazing and jessie is sugar a poison to the body yes controversial we'll discuss that some more has understanding your blood sugar changed how you eat 100 absolutely if we eat our food in a different order does it change our blood sugar responses it can change it by up to 75 percent amazing so jesse what's the biggest misconception surrounding blood sugar that in order to have steady blood sugar you have to give up eating all starches and all sweets brilliant and i'm sure we're going to talk quite a lot about this wow all right why don't we start at the beginning sarah can you explain what is blood sugar yeah so blood sugar typically refers to the level of glucose that circulates in our blood and this is mainly determined by the foods that we eat so when we consume foods or meals containing carbohydrates they're broken down into very simple molecules called glucose and we tend to use the term blood sugar when we're talking about blood glucose and so when you consume a meal containing carbohydrates what happens is that after about 30 minutes you get this quite big increase in circulating blood sugar that returns to baseline around two hours and so imagine how we typically eat where we consume multiple meals and multiple snacks throughout the day this means that your blood sugar levels are going up and down and oscillating all around throughout the day and sarah help us understand what it's for why do we have blood sugar why are we even bothering to have a podcast to talk about it obviously we eat and most of us eat foods that contain carbohydrates so the um every person every day is experiencing these oscillations these peaks and troughs in blood glucose so this is relevant to everyone listening and the reason that it's particularly important is because we also know that these increases and these dips in glucose play quite a large role in disease we know that if you have excessive peaks it causes a whole downstream um effects of oxidative stress inflammation for example and so not only does it increase our risk of type 2 diabetes which most people associate blood sugar with but it also increases our risk of any disease that's underpinned by inflammation and this can include cardiovascular disease um some cancers as well for example and so why do we have blood sugar at all sarah i've heard all of these bad things about it so should i get what's the point should i get rid of blood sugar no um so you have it like i said because obviously from the food that you eat but you also need sugar in your in your blood to provide fuel for for your muscles to function for your tissues for your organs to function so it does have a role to play where the problem comes in my opinion is where you have excessive spikes you have these excessive peaks and these excessive dips in blood sugar so what we don't want to do is encourage everyone to flat line um but it's when it becomes uncontrolled just to help us unders understand sarah could i function if i if there was no blood sugar in my body no you need a certain amount of it and particularly for brain function um in particular got it so like no blood sugar i die yes okay so we we need it so that sounds good and then we talk about maybe sometimes you know certain too much of it or or something like that might be bad and i think that's what we're going to to explore now um thank you sarah so one way we can explore this is there's this new sort of blood sugar monitoring device right jesse that you can wear at home that can measure your blood sugar every five minutes could you tell us about it and your own experiences with it yeah absolutely so the first time i wore a continuous glucose monitor was about four years ago and it completely changed my life because i realized jonathan that glucose spikes so these rapid increases in your blood sugar concentration after we eat were actually one of the triggers for my difficult mental health episodes that i had been experiencing since i was a teenager so i finally had found a cause or a trigger for something that had been plaguing me for a really long time and with this glucose monitor i was able to see how what i ate how i moved how i slept and all of these other variables were impacting my glucose spikes and it's pretty cool you know on your phone to be able to see that your blood sugar levels are responding to how you're living and to me it was a bit like finally being able to communicate with my body finally feeling like i had a channel it was open communication there was a dialogue i could see what was happening underneath my skin and so it really fascinated me firstly because i wanted to heal myself and not experience these mental health problems anymore so i dove into the research and um i actually discovered that i wasn't alone that about 80 to 90 percent of the population experiences glucose spikes every day and then i discovered these really easy tips that allowed me to avoid these spikes feel better without giving up you know carbs and eating sugar and pasta which i love so it sort of gave you suddenly this insight into something that's going on inside your body which previously you sort of had no idea what you were feeling these results but you had no idea what was going on yeah it was a bit of a black box i didn't understand how what i was eating and what i was doing was impacting how i was feeling so it was really light bulb moment for me it completely changed my life and you've talked about your your particular experience about how it links to mental health but maybe we just step back and talk more more broadly about how blood sugar affects our health so i think we've already established that if you have no blood sugar you're dead so that's not a good place um what about the other end of the spectrum what happens what about the other side absolutely i think there's an easy image we can use imagine that you're a plant if we give a plant too little water the plant dies that's what sarah was saying no blood sugar you die but if you give a plant too much water the plant drowns so it's about finding the right middle ground and for humans it's the same thing yes we need glucose every single one of our cells uses glucose for energy and to perform its function but if we give ourselves too much glucose then problems start arising and there's a wide array of symptoms that you might feel if your glucose levels are imbalanced if you're experiencing these glucose spikes on a daily basis and the most common ones are experiencing cravings becoming hungry very quickly after a meal so within 90 minutes or two hours feeling like you really need to eat again having energy dips throughout the day so you know feeling a bit controlled by this sort of roller coaster of you eat something high in carbs then you crash and you're hungry you have cravings you're tired and sort of staying on that roller coaster and in my own experience and in my community those are the most common symptoms that anybody can feel and anybody can relate to even without wearing a glucose monitor and then if you look a bit more medium term and long term you know glucose spikes have been associated with hormonal dysfunction like conditions like polycystic ovarian syndrome and sarah i know you did a lot of research into menopause acne poor sleep there's a correlation with weight gain right there and then long term of course type 2 diabetes and as sarah mentioned because glucose spikes lead to inflammation they really create a very favorable terrain for all chronic diseases to develop i just wanted to ask about like a flat blood sugar so because i think one of the natural consequences i think if you're listening to this is okay this all sounds bad so presumably my ambition is to have a completely flat blood sugar uh through the day um is that the right takeaway so no because you can actually have a very flat blood sugar while eating things that are really unhealthy so let me give you an example if you add a lot of alcohol to your diet it's going to flatten your glucose curves if you add a glass of wine to your meal it's going to flatten the glucose spike of that meal similarly if you add a lot of fat to a meal and this can be you know very unhealthy fat like trans fat that's also going to flatten the curve of the meal but that does not mean that you're actually helping your body be healthier so in my mind it's not about trying to reach for this perfectly flat line because that's an objective that can be abused really what we're looking at jonathan is trying to just reduce this roller coaster sort of flatten the spikes you know minimize the dips as well by using simple hacks and we don't need to be super anal about it and go for something incredibly flat we just need to think okay based on how i feel today could i feel better and if the answer to that is yes you can start applying these hacks flatten your glucose curves and start getting the benefits yeah i mean i want to kind of second that because i think this is one thing that worries me about this explosion in healthy individuals of using continuous glucose monitoring which i think is highly valuable but i think that people need to use them in an informed way and one thing that i worry about is people being obsessed with flat lining and exactly like jesse said jonathan is then selecting these very unhealthy highly processed high fat foods and you know going into keto diets which are based on incredibly unhealthy aspects of a keto diet and i think that's really important that people make sure they still consume a balanced diet they can still consume carbohydrates but there's ways and i think jesse can can talk about this in a lot more detail there's ways that you can do this in a way that doesn't have downstream unfavorable health effects i guess the message is um which i think we often get in nutrition right like if you just think about one thing and then you you don't think about what you're switching to you could easily go from something that you know is actually worse uh than where you were before and i guess if you're not eating any carbohydrates you have to eat fats and if you're not eating really healthy fats you're you're potentially in the worst place and something else something else johnson when i first wore a glucose monitor so i was noticing that you know alcohol and high fat foods were keeping my glucose levels steadier flatter and i also noticed that exercise created glucose spikes so if i had just focused on keeping my glucose levels steady i would have stopped working out and started drinking heavily and you know i think this is a diet that many people would love to follow jesse you're not recommending it no absolutely not so i completely agree sarah if we really need information and you know that's what i've spent the past several years of my life trying to do is like distill the useful parts of using glucose to make informed food decisions while also nuancing giving context and there's a chapter in my book it's one of the first ones and it says what not to take away from your glucose levels it's incredibly important and it's a complex subject and if you're just thrown into it and you get a glucose monitor and you haven't read anything about this topic you might be very confused it's quite difficult data to interpret and you might start you know drawing conclusions that are actually not good for your health so if you want to wear a glucose monitor check out my work you know i have lots of stuff for free on instagram i also have a book but that'll give you context so that you can go into it armed with the right information yeah and just to add to that as well i think it's also important that people are aware in this context that it's one piece of a big puzzle that it's not the only thing that drives our health it's not the only thing that will determine our cardiovascular type 2 diabetes obesity risk it's an important piece of the puzzle and it inter interacts with the other important pieces of the puzzle so it interacts with our blood fat control it interacts with our microbiome for example but we also need to consider the bigger picture as well um and what is great about you know wearing a cgm and being able to monitor your glucose is you can do that in real time and you can have some control yet a lot of the other risk factors um you can't measure and monitor and modify in the same way but i think it's really important people know it's one piece of a big puzzle and i think that's what's great with you know the the work that we're doing at zoe is that unlike what's been done previously in research where we tend to focus on one exposure you know so one risk factor for example blood blood glucose and one outcome we've been looking at all of the pieces of the puzzle where and we can see how important the blood sugar is for different individuals how important your microbiome is and how it all interrelates so can we talk a bit about menopause now you were you were talking about changes um in these blood sugar responses yeah so we we've done some great research on the zoe predict studies where we've looked at how the menopause impacts a whole host of factors we know that the menopause is this state of you know great upheaval and causes lots of symptoms that people feel physically whether it's hot flushes whether it's lack of sleep brain fog etc but what we also wanted to look at is how does the menopause impact how we process our carbohydrates how does it impact our blood glucose levels and interestingly we found that postmenopausal women have a really big increase in circulating blood glucose levels compared to premenopausal women even when we match their age and this is really important because this shows it isn't just an age related change that happens anyway as we age sadly you know we do all put a bit more weight on we do increase our blood pressure etc but what we found is when we match people for their age we still found this big difference between the pre and post and we also saw this big difference as well as in the peaks so these peaks that we know really important in terms of inflammation and oxidative stress we saw a big difference as well in the dips and it the difference in in the dips was a lot more pronounced in post-menopausal women than pre-menopausal women and so if i'm listening to this and that that describes me what does that mean about what's what i should be doing differently what does it mean about how my body is going to be reacting if i'm say eating the same food that i was eating for the last 20 years yeah and i think this is something everyone uh or you know certainly people my age i'm mid 40s and sadly myself many of my friends are going through this meant you know perimenopausal transition and it's something that everyone talks about now thankfully that we weren't talking about in previous generations and people say exactly what you said jonathan but i was eating exactly the same foods that i vet for the last 20 years but i'm putting weight on i'm feeling a bit rubbish and interestingly we have did actually see from the zoe predict research that um people post-menopausal women were tempting to eat more sugar and more carbohydrate-rich foods but i think what's really interesting with this is that we know that it's the peaks we know that it's the dips that are changing post-menopausally and we know that there's things that we can do about it so we can either suggest to people okay try and modify the types of food we're having or we can suggest to them the kind of hacks i think jesse will talk about um a little bit later that would also be able to modify the peaks so you could say okay carry on with the food you're having but do these hacks as well so you can attenuate that so it's just saying you're at higher risk and so fundamentally sarah you're saying i just want to make sure that this is clear you know i might be eating exactly the same breakfast say that i was eating 15 years ago and before i wasn't having very big peaks with it my body could deal with this and now you know i'm perimenopause or or menopause and i'm having the same food but i'm having these much bigger peaks and then these are having the impacts that you were talking about before yeah absolutely so basically the menopause just is really blooming unkind to us women and it does mean yes 20 years ago you could have had exactly the same you know panic chocolate or whatever and then you have it post menopause and you're having a very different response and you're also increasing your cravings for the same food right you're eating the same food but your dips are now bigger probably and so and this also we see this even in people who are still menstruating the week before your period you also your glucose control is not as good so the same food that you had just a week ago is going to create a bigger spike and likely a bigger crash so the same usual food is just creating cravings where it wasn't creating them before and that that's really interesting jessie because some new research that's very hot off the press jonathan um we only crunched the numbers yesterday that we've done um from our zoe health studies data where we had hundreds of thousands of pre and post-menopausal women telling us about their diet and telling us about their menopause symptoms and what we found is that people that had higher intakes of sugar-sweetened beverages so basically sugary drinks had a lot worse symptoms and so you're getting these cravings that you said jesse is craving them people having cravings to have more sugar sweetened beverages and then that's acting to then just make their symptoms worse and the kind of symptoms it was making worse were the ones that people find most burdensome things like the brain fog like the hot flashes like the anxiety for example and so are you suggesting that if you switch um switch what you're eating then potentially and i know you're not saying this is proven to say this but potentially that can impact your your symptoms yes based on the research that um we looked at or the data that we looked at yesterday there's a really strong association between the foods that you're eating and the severity of your symptoms and this is the first data or first study to ever look at that which is super exciting that's amazing and not yet peer reviewed and published i guess we should we should add in that case no these numbers were literally crunched yesterday so this is a real kind of preview we're getting something right now that's good well i know scientists are normally rather cautious about uh about what they talk about um we're not when it's this exciting jonathan is this exciting that means sarah feels very confident yeah and um other than menopause do we also see a lot of personalization elsewhere or is this sort of specific to that situation so we see huge differences in individuals and i touched on this at the beginning that from the predict program of research one of the key aims is actually looking at how different are people so in nutritional research and population-based guidelines we typically have a kind of one-size-fits-all approach and what we're trying to do at zoe is move beyond that one size fits all because we know that we're all individual we have all you know all of our thousands of biochemical processes are slightly different and when we look at people's blood glucose responses in our predict studies to identical meals again in this very tightly controlled setting that i mentioned jesse earlier we see there's a huge difference we see probably you know more than a tenfold difference between individuals and these are healthy individuals that we recruited into this study consuming exactly the same breakfast and i think what's what i find particularly fascinating as well as the size of the variability in responses to the same meals is that the variability is really so much greater in this what we call the postprandial phase so it's so much greater in the two hours after consuming the meal compared to fasting and the reason i think this is really interesting is because what this allows us to do is for people like myself and jesse for example might have exactly the same fasting glucose exactly the same hba1c which is a measure that is often used clinically to look at people's blood glucose control but if we were to consume exactly the same breakfast jesse might have a really high response and i might have a really low response now we wouldn't have seen that by just measuring fasting levels and this is what i think excites me a lot about the blood glucose variability that we see from the predict studies that we see so much bigger variability in the postprandial so this two hour post post eating the male phase so it allows us to discriminate long before anything's played out in that fasting state so it gives us a real peak into the future also of someone's long-term health i think it's very cool and you know you mentioned sarah if we both had the same breakfast we probably see very different responses and i think that's really interesting and it's fascinating and it's really cool once you're able to get into that phase of sort of personalization and i would also say for people who do not have access or the ability to see their own glucose spikes and how they might relate to like their friends or their partners or you know yours sarah mine there are hacks that everybody can use that regardless of what the height of your spike would be if you used one of the hacks your spike would be smaller so sarah if you and i both had cereal for breakfast and i had a much bigger spike than you if we both used let's say the heck of having vegetables first both of our spikes would be you know smaller so in in my mind people often ask me like how much of this is personalized how different am i really and do we have general principles that can apply to everybody and i believe the answer is yes you have a baseline of like easy principles and then you can get into the personalization i don't know how you feel about that sarah yeah i mean this is what i think is really exciting that traditionally i think people have always thought it's all about what you eat so um the foods that you're eating is what determines your response that's it or it's all set in our genes you know i was a child growing up in the 70s when my mum said well everything's you know predetermined by your genes and what our research shows which is really exciting is that your blood glucose response is not about not just about who you are but it's also about how you eat and i think some of your hacks are great on this and it's also it's also about what you eat so it's who how and what and i think that's really empowering for people because there will be people that don't want to change the food that they're eating so they can adapt how they're eating it for example and i think it's a brilliant point actually to let let's talk about we like talking about actionable advice on this podcast so what can we do to control our blood sugar and maybe maybe let's start with what we eat because i think that is the most obvious sarah and then let's talk about all those other things um that we can do after that so i think jesse your best placed um to maybe talk about this and what i'd love to do is also jump in jesse on a few examples where we've actually applied your hacks within our predict studies so we have some mini protocols in our predict studies and uh summer results that i think would be interesting to to uh let you know again hot off the press nice oh my god this is so exciting i didn't know i was gonna get all this cool data uh okay so i think the easiest hack which is very simple for people who actually don't want to change you know what they're eating because that can feel a bit daunting at the beginning is actually simply looking at the order in which you're eating the constituents of a meal so in the studies they found that just by eating your food in the right order during a meal you can reduce the glucose bike of that meal by up to 75 percent while still eating the exact same foods and this has a tremendous impact on your physical and your mental health and so the correct order is during a meal vegetables first proteins and fats second and then starches and sugars last and one of the main reasons this works in reducing the glucose spike of the meal is thanks to the effect of the fiber that is in the vegetables and that fiber will reduce the speed and the quantity of glucose absorbed from for later on in the meal and then proteins and fat second we know those also slow down gastric emptying digestion speed and so overall if you're eating your meal in that correct order you'll have a smaller glucose spike and that means fewer cravings being less hungry a few hours later fewer energy dips and then whatever symptoms you're contending with you know maybe it's difficult menopause symptoms maybe it's like acne maybe it's just generalized inflammation those will also be able to be reduced when you use the food order hack and sarah is that a hack you guys have been testing because i'm so curious that is a hack we've been testing so so we've had lots of our participants who have uh tried them the food ordering hack where they we've done in quite a simple way um where they have cheese they wait 15 minutes and then they have white bread and then on and this is fasted so it's a little bit controlled and then the next day they just have the cheese on the bread so they have exactly the same food but they don't have that 15 minute break and we do see a significant reduction in their blood sugar blood glucose response nice and for those listening you don't have to wait 15 minutes even if you just reorder and have veggies first and carbs last you'll still see an improvement in the glucose response because i think for most people like waiting 15 minutes would be pretty impractical yeah i mean we were doing this to really kind of show the proof of principle and that was a question i wanted to ask is could i have my mixed meal where maybe you know i have my bit of pasta or rice you know some chicken and some vegetables can i literally just eat my vegetables and then straight away the next minute start on to my protein my chicken or whatever and then straight away start on the pasta absolutely so you know it's a spectrum so if you were to wait 15 minutes between each constituent you would see a greater effect but also if you just eat them one after the other you will still see a pretty good effect as opposed to eating them all together or starting with the carbohydrates so it's always as you know you know it's always a spectrum you can always do a bit worse for your glucose and a bit better for your glucose but if you just reorder and eat everything in sequence you will still see a pretty big impact so let's say we're out in a restaurant and we're having a starter if i was to consume maybe a starter that was either vegetable based or protein based and then i was to have as typically would happen it would be about 15 minutes later that your main course would come when i'm consuming that main course could i consume everything kind of all mixed in at once having at least before that having had either my vegetable my high fiber or my high protein and fat starter so you don't need to do anything you can decide how much you want to use the food order hack and would that work still yes it would work absolutely and your example of adding i just want to mention because sometimes people can feel like oh does this mean i have to separate out every single dish you know deconstruct every sandwich and no that's not the point the point is using this information when it's easy and so sarah the fact that you mentioned the starter is actually the hack i was about to talk about so we're just like super connected the other hack is just add a starter that is built around vegetables vegetable based starter to all of your meals and then eat your regular meal as you would usually that's just another way to use that same principle of fiber first to impact your glucose curve and so let me give you an example if you're having like a mixed dish so let's say you're having you know pasta with chicken in it and maybe you know parmesan and some cauliflower you can just add a veggie starter like a green salad maybe some vinegar at the beginning of the meal and then eat the mixed main dish and still get a really big impact and that'll be better than not having the vegetable starter and it's you can compose with it as you as you wish does that make sense yeah absolutely thank you yeah of course of course of course so what other than food ordering can we do jesse so i want to mention vinegar because this is this was quite shocking to me when i when i saw you know the clinical studies that we're looking at the impact of vinegar on your meals glucose bike so if you have a tablespoon of vinegar it can be any type of vinegar avoid balsamic glaze because that has a bunch of sugar in it if you have a tablespoon of vinegar before a meal either in a tall glass of water and you drink it or as a dressing on your starter for example you can curb the glucose spike of that meal by up to 30 percent without changing anything of what you're eating during the meal so you're just adding this vinegar ingredient and the way it works is because vinegar contains a magical molecule called acetic acid that has a few impacts on the body one it slows down the breakdown of starch into glucose and two it encourages your muscles to uptake more glucose as it arrives in your bloodstream and so as a result the glucose spike of your meal is smaller but you didn't change anything about what you were eating and there's some really early studies that show for example the impact of just adding two vinegar drinks a day on glucose levels on diabetes markers also on polycystic ovarian syndrome symptoms and they seem to have a pretty good effect small studies of course for these specific diseases but overall we understand the mechanism and it's really easy and personally this has helped me hugely with my cravings if i have a vinegar drink before a meal i know i'm going to be curbing those sugar chocolate cravings that usually happen for me an hour and a half after meals and something else that i find really cool about this topic is that vinegar has been used for millennia in many cultures around the world for example in iran and people know culturally that it's a healthy thing to have in our diets but they didn't understand why and now we have some clues that it has something to do with glucose levels and sarah this sounds a little controversial what are your what are your thoughts on on vinegar as the magic solution for our blood sugar so i must say i must well i was very skeptical i thought oh my gosh this is one of those quacky um food things so yeah i did go and check out the research um and i have to um admit i was uh wrong in my um uh opinion and yeah the evidence seems uh quite good on this so um i think it's a great hack if you'd have asked me two weeks ago i wouldn't have said that and are there at this point are there any randomized control trials actually showing sort of the long-term impact because i guess this is always the question which is you can see an impact on your blood sugar but you don't actually know what the long-term health impact has flowed through have they reached this at this point or is this sort of upcoming there are a few like six-month-long studies but i think those are the longest ones while we're on vinegar i think um something to ask and this is more from something i don't know um about for people that then want to go away and do this and want to have a tablespoon of vinegar before every single meal and let's say they're consuming a typical kind of uk eating style where it's three main meals you know three snacks you're having six eating events throughout the day if they were to have then six tablespoons every day before a meal are there any possible side effects to this so i'm just being over i'm just being cautious because i know that people will take these recommendations and i don't know the answer and i i know because you've researched this a lot hopefully you will have the answer of course so there's a few key things to keep in mind one always dilute the vinegar in water two if you can use a straw because that'll be uh better for the enamel of your teeth so in the literature i was looking like are there any side effects can you overdose on vinegar like what's the situation and the only thing i found is a woman who was consuming i believe 30 tablespoons of straight vinegar for a few years started having potassium deficiencies so that's the only thing i have found and vinegar it's just it's just another food and it seems there's no real side effects of having several times a day of course listen to your body if it doesn't agree with you you know stop personally i do very well if i have it three times a day you don't need to have it before every single meal for example you know i'll have some vinegar if i see it on my counter in my kitchen and i remember to do it or if i'm like i could have a little vinegar drink right now but how much you apply it to your life is really a function of how you're feeling how much you think you have a you know glucose spikes happening all the time and then how much you enjoy it because if it's stressful and you don't like the taste like don't even force it but from a purely health perspective that doesn't seem to be any side effects of having vinegar multiple times a day okay and one more question on this topic um are you talking about kind of table vinegar that in the uk for example we would put on our fish and chips or are you talking about a different kind of vinegar no very simple like table vinegar that you buy that you put in your salad dressings that you put on your chips definitely do not buy the vinegar that's with the cleaning products in your supermarket that's six percent acetic acid and that's too strong you're just looking for the regular vinegar that you might see on the table at the restaurant or that you might use when you're cooking so like a white wine vinegar red wine vinegar okay white wine vinegar red wine vinegar cherry vinegar apple cider vinegar any type of vinegar rice vinegar plum vinegar it's really about the acetic acid and it's present in all types of vinegar so you're fine well i've got a great idea for our next research jonathan that all of these hacks i think we should try and see how it affects glucose dips oh my god yes please let's do it you heard it here first for sure you heard it here so just before we go to the next hack i'm conscious that there'll be people listening here and saying okay but i'm open to changing what i eat and i'm actually not at all clear what foods really affect my um my blood sugar so could we sort of address that also for a minute like what should i be eating if i want to reduce these spikes i am maybe concerned i feel like i'm having these um what's causing it what could i shift to yeah absolutely so the two main types of food that contain glucose are starchy and sweet foods so put very simply if you reduce the quantity of those in your diet so if you reduce you know bread pasta rice potatoes and you reduce also sweet foods desserts sugar you know fruit juices fruit products you're going to reduce the glucose spikes in your body but then it's really important to not sort of replace those with unhealthy processed foods that might keep your glucose levels steady but are really high in fat for example so the one place jonathan that i think is actually really really valuable and important to change what you're eating and this is the place with the biggest bang for its buck is breakfast so at breakfast if you're able to switch from eating sweet and starchy foods to eating savory foods based around protein this is going to have a humongous impact on how you feel for the rest of the day as sarah mentioned it's gonna you know it's gonna control your glucose dips and spikes for the rest of the day as well so that's the only hack where i really encourage people to truly change what they're eating going from sweet to savory jesse some of what you're suggesting here is at odds with what what people are told about um whether they have their carbohydrate in the morning or afternoon um so i just love your opinion on this so we've seen again in our zoe predict studies but also there's been other published research on this that shows that you have better glycemic control in the morning and so you know many people might be aware that if you do want to have carbohydrates have it in the morning because we see a lower blood sugar response in the morning compared to if you consume it later in the day and we see this with our own research although it's very variable between individuals and so this is something i often advise people who are worried but now that's at odds with that so how do we uh not give contradictory advice i think one of the problems with that is that you're looking at it in the in a vacuum right so you're looking at cookie at 9am versus cookie at 6 p.m and it says oh 9 a.m cookie is better but you're not necessarily thinking about what the impact of a 9 a.m cookie is going to have on the rest of your day and that the 9 am cookie is going to create an 11 a.m crash and an 11 am craving and you're going to be hungrier for the rest of the day so i believe that the benefits of eating you know your carbs earlier in the day do not outweigh the benefits of having a savory breakfast so i personally have seen and i recommend you have a savory breakfast and if you do want to eat carbs actually or something very sweet for example a cookie best time to do that is as dessert after lunch or dinner because i believe the you know the 9 a.m 6 p.m time of day thing is just less impactful than using the food order and having a savory breakfast but there are there's a lot of different pieces of advice and it can be confusing to put them all together for sure yeah that's why i just want to get your opinion on that i think that's really helpful because i want to make sure you know we do other podcasts where we'll talk about time of day so it's really important we make sure that we're giving you know unified advice so i think we have time for one final hack jesse which you touched on a little bit which is about exercise yes okay so sarah mentioned in the beginning of the podcast that you know glucose is your body's source of energy and your muscles specifically are really happy to use glucose if you need them to contract so a very simple hack is after your meals use your muscles for 10 minutes this can be walking it can be dancing it can be whatever folding your laundry cleaning your apartment whatever you want to do for 10 minutes because as you exercise and contract your muscles they will soak up glucose from your bloodstream to power themselves and as a result the glucose won't accumulate as much in your bloodstream but rather will be used for energy directly so within an hour after the end of a meal just get up move for 10 minutes you'll see a big impact on your glucose levels and how you feel jonathan there's one other hack that we did in our zoopedic studies that is actually one that jesse has as well in her book so i would quite like to mention that and this is about food combinations so we had individuals on one day having just white bread for breakfast then on another day layering onto their white bread some cheese and some spread and so each day they were consuming the identical amount of carbohydrate but one day they had the added fat and protein and we saw a significantly lower increase in blood glucose levels when they layered on the fat and protein and i know this is something that you talk about as well jesse and about how you combine your foods yeah i talk about don't leave your carbs naked so always put some clothing on your carbs so protein fat or fiber and so anytime you're eating something starchy like white bread or something sweet make sure you add protein fat or fiber because that way the glucose from the starch here the sweet food won't hit your bloodstream as quickly and as a result you'll get a smaller spike now there's a little caveat to this because you know we mentioned just add some fat to your carbs don't add two pounds of butter to your piece of white bread because that might cause you know other downstream consequences so the best clothing is really fiber then second best i would say is protein and third best and make sure it's healthy fat will be the fat i think we could keep talking about hacks for the rest of the day but i think we better wrap this up so let me try and um quickly summarize what was a very wide-ranging conversation so to start with big blood sugar spikes over and over a bad um a lot of processed food in particular can cause these high blood sugar spikes that said blood sugar is just one of the things that matters when we think about our diet um we shouldn't be trying to aim for a flat blood sugar otherwise we would have the all-butter diet you'd have no blood sugar spikes and no one that i've met so far says that the the all-butter diet is is a healthy diet all alcohol all butter and all alcohol jesse yes so we'll call that the jessie diet now so um definitely something that we can't do um menopause is one of the um uh points in our lives where we can see a huge change in blood sugar responses as well as um other responses that sarah talked about more broadly there's lots of personalization so some people have very high responses like me other people much lower so that clearly affects how much you you care about it and then we talked about some fantastic hacks about trying to manage your blood sugar uh better and the breakfast is a place where you can really make a big change and have a probably a big impact on your total blood sugar through the day we talked about a tablespoon of vinegar um and it sounds like the full verdict is not yet in and then we talked about two final attack hacks i think one is use your muscles for 10 minutes after eating um uh go for a little walk for example do something in your apartment or your house and finally we talked about food combinations so you can uh take whatever you wanted to eat the piece of bread add some high quality fat and protein to it and actually sort of improve the quality of that meal and lower the blood sugar spike did i capture the the hacks jesse jonathan you're officially a glucose goddess no one has ever said that to me that's amazing so just before we go i've got a final list and a question uh from gemma on on instagram for you jessie uh and she said very simply how do i stop craving so much sugar mmm well gemma i think you'll find something quite interesting is that often when we crave sugar we are actually being the victims of these blood sugar spikes and dips we're on this blood sugar roller coaster and often the response to a craving is feeling shame about it feeling guilty trying to apply willpower to sort of overcome it and so what i would say gemma is look at the root cause see if using the hax is something that you can easily do in your life because if you do you'll be able to reduce your glucose roller coaster and naturally your cravings should dissipate and what happened for me is that when i studied my glucose levels my relationship to things i used to crave really changed instead of feeling this impulse instead of feeling controlled by my cravings i now could decide with joy and pleasure to eat the chocolate cake the chocolate ice cream the nutella crepe without feeling controlled by it so hopefully as you balance your glucose levels the cravings will dissipate and you'll change your relationship to sugar amazing thank you both uh so much jesse and sarah i really enjoyed that and i think our audience will have had a lot to take away from this conversation i hope we'll be talking again soon thank you both can't wait for the studies fabulous thanks jesse great to chat with you thank you thank you to jesse and sarah for joining me on zoe science and nutrition today we hope you enjoyed today's episode if you did please be sure to subscribe and leave us a review as we love reading your feedback if this episode left you with questions please send them in on instagram or facebook and we will try to answer them in a future episode at zoe we want to improve the health of millions by understanding the right food for each of us to improve our health and manage our weight each member starts with an at-home test comparing them with participants in the world's largest nutrition science study if you're interested in learning more about zoe you can head to joinzoe.com podcast and get 10 off your personalized nutrition program as always i'm your host jonathan wolf zoe science and nutrition is produced by fascinate productions with support from sharon feder and alex jones here at zoe see you next time [Music] you

Channel: ZOE

Views: 748,526

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Id: PrvSLtRLDg0

Length: 47min 8sec (2828 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 25 2022