Moment 124: 10 Sugar Hacks So You Can Eat Whatever You Want! Jessie Inchauspé

0:02If this glucose roller coaster is bad for me, the spikes and the crashes, how does one flatten the glucose curve? And your book you talk about these 10 hacks. Yeah. Can we go through some of these hacks to... But for sure, I think that's the most important really because... So hack one? Hack one, yeah. Eat food in the right order. Yeah. What did you mean by that? So to give some context, like all the hacks in my books, they are just summaries of scientific studies. So when I was going really deep into all the science, I found, you know, all these symptoms and conditions linked to spikes, and I found also these amazing ways we could still eat everything we loved, but without creating these spikes, right?

0:48So still eating everything you love, but reducing any symptoms or any problems you might be having physically a mentality. Okay, so eat your food in the right order. So next time you're faced with a meal, listeners, next time you're faced with a meal, there's something amazing that you should know. If you eat the ingredients in the meal in a specific order, you can reduce the glucose spike of that meal by up to 75%. Without changing how much you're eating, what you're eating, just the order has a massive impact on your glucose. So you can still eat the same meal with way less spikes than way less consequences.

1:28So the right order is veggies first. I should make a t -shirt. Veggies first, proteins and fats, second, and starches and sugars last. So let's take an example of a meal, maybe. Steven, what's the typical meal you have and then we'll add stuff for the egg. Okay, so let's say cookies, that's your sugars. Let's say you're having cookies, let's say, I don't know, you eat fish. Yeah. Okay, let's say. Everything to be honest. I just, I'm so other than snails, I've still got a little bit of a psychological issue there, but I've never tried snails and I'm French. Really? It just grosses me out. Something you need to figure out.

2:02Okay, so let's say you have like some fish, some broccoli, some pasta, some olive oil and avocado and a cookie. So the right order for your glucose levels is going to be the broccoli first, then the fish, then the pasta and the cookie and the avocado and olive oil. You can kind of have it like with the fish. Now this is an interesting like theoretical thing to understand. It might not always be very practical to just separate out your meal and be like, okay, this first, that then, that then. But there's a few things you should know. Number one, you don't actually have to wait between any of these foods.

2:39You can just eat them one after the other and still get the amazing impact on your glucose levels. And number two, really the most important thing here that we need to learn from this scientific study is that the veggies should come first. So what I do now and what, you know, my community does is that we all have always have a veggie starter at the beginning of a meal and then we just eat the rest of the meal, kind of normally. And that already has a massive impact on your glucose levels and how are you going to feel? A lot of people when they do it and they do it very much in the opposite order in terms of like kind of they leave the veggies on the side of the plate.

3:15You know, I think when I was a kid I'd go for whatever was tasty first. Yeah. When the, whatever, the green stuff. I always went for the pasta first. Yeah, exactly. And then it was like a requirement. So often parents will say eat the fucking greens as well before you get your dessert. You know, that's interesting. Although in restaurants obviously dessert comes last, which is probably. And in restaurants also, you know, bread usually comes first. And so let me explain why it's so important to avoid having the bread first. So bread is a starch. And as I explained, you know, there's starches and sugars and those are the two things that turn into glucose when we digest them.

3:48And so when we eat something that contains glucose on an empty stomach. So when we eat it first, like a piece of bread, the starch breaks down in two glucose molecules in your stomach and then a shoot makes this way super quickly into your intestine and your bloodstream because there's nothing stopping it. There's like, hey, just like roll the coaster. So it goes straight from your mouth to your bloodstream. So very quickly, the glucose makes its way to your bloodstream and increases the concentration and causes a spike. Now, if you start your meal with veggies instead, this is what happens. Veggies contain another superwoman.

4:23And I love how all my molecules and substances are female. But anyway, she's a super woman fiber. Have you heard of fiber before? I love fiber. You love fiber. So veggies contain fiber. And fiber when we eat it at the beginning of a meal, she does something absolutely amazing. When she arrives first in your stomach and digestive tract, she makes this way from your stomach to your upper intestine. And there she deploys itself, like onto the walls of your intestine, like in a cool viscous protective mesh and just stays there protecting you. That viscous mesh that fiber has created is then going to reduce the spike of your meal because all the glucose molecules arriving later on from like the pasta, for example, are not going to be able to make their way as quickly and as much through your intestine into your bloodstream.

5:15Because of the fiber shield, the glucose molecules are going to take way longer to make their way into your bloodstream. As a result, you get a smaller spike. But you still ate the same food. Just with some veggies first. I know. She's amazing. So I want to go to a restaurant. You go to some restaurants. They give you bread. Others like the Japanese ones give you like edamame. Yeah, that's much better. That's a veggie, right? So any type of veggie is going to be really helpful. And I try to make it make up about like 30 % of my meal. And it can be anything. They can be raw. They can be cooked.

5:50In my new book, I have like 35 amazing veggie starter recipes. You can dress them. You can put, you know, some, I don't know, olive oil, vinegar, lemon, cheese, whatever onto it to make that veggie starter feel really delicious because it's going to protect you so much. And if you're somebody who suffers from cravings in the afternoon or unsteady energy, I think this hack is a really powerful one to try out. I often, you know, I'm a speedy too. I'm going to be honest. I'm not going to lie to you. I am I tend to eat my meals super quick. And I think the excuse I tell myself bullshit or not is that because I'm busy, I just like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

6:26And when I'm I know because if I eat something, say with my girlfriend or whatever, she's she I mean, she like literally blesses the food with her hands first. And then she like takes her time. I eat super fast too. I'm like treating it like it says competition, you know, yeah. And she's often said to me, she's like, they just like that. Like just and um, one of the points that someone raised him at some point about my like super fast eating habit was that it is bad for me. Now I'm wondering from what you said there, if the speed in which we has an impact on glucose spikes as well, if I ate slower, could I flatten the curve?

7:06Absolutely, baby. Yes. Really? She's right. Well, yes. Then again, listen, I'm a very strong proponent of like pick your battles, right? And like, yes, we could all do better in so many different ways, but also, you know, you're a speed eater. That's fine. Maybe you just do. I'm trying to live my best life. Okay. So if you want to slow down aging and do all that, so you can do two things. You can either just eat as quickly as you want, but out of veggie starter at the beginning of your meal, right? That already is going to have very powerful impact on your glucose. I would argue it probably will have a stronger impact than just eating the same meal more study because you're not going to eat the meal over like two hours, right?

7:43You may go from like three minutes to eight minutes. It's not that big of a difference. The veggie starter will have a much bigger impact on your glucose than just increasing that by a few minutes. Do you remember hacking number three from your book? Stop counting calories. That's a ghost writer check. I can confirm. I can confirm you write your book. I did. It has so much fun writing the book. So what do you know about calories? Very little. Yeah. Tell me like the what I what I think they are. Yeah. Or just generally. It's a thing. Yes. Thermo. I'm talking like a much simpler definition. Okay.

8:23I was going to try and impress you. So oh sure. You can if you want to. Please. It's like a thermonuclear reaction where a calorie is the measure of how much heat is required to break down a molecule of food. It's really not bad. Thank you. Wow. You really should give yourself more credit because when before we started you were like I know nothing about food and biochemistry actually you know some pretty good. I know from just like doing this podcast. Yeah. This is why I redid it because they're very selfish reasons and I realized that it's helping a lot of other people that are also idiots. But that's what I know from guests that I've sat here.

8:56So that's my definition of a calorie. Fantastic. So I think a lot of people will also stay like oh yeah calories are bad like I need to eat not too many calories otherwise bad stuff happens and I gain weight or whatever. So I want you to know how calories were actually invented and measured because it is completely mind boggling. So the way that scientists first started measuring the calories in a food is the following. Okay. So let's use our imagination here. The scientists they took a box. Okay. And they put a food in that box. Let's say that cookie. They put the cookie in a box. Then they put this box with a cookie in it under I mean it in another box that contains water.

9:41So they submerge the cookie box in water. Okay. And then somehow they light the cookie inside the small box on fire. They burn the cookie and they measure by how many degrees the water, the surrounding water increases in temperature. That is how we measured calories. Literally measuring how much heat happens when we burn that food. So as a result you might say okay well you know you might test a cookie in this setting and you might test it against I don't know an avocado. And you might see that the temperature in that big box increases by as many degrees for both the cookie and the avocado. So you know from a calorie perspective you'd say these two foods contain the same number of calories.

10:31But that's a really reductive way of thinking about food. It's almost like thinking these two books are both 500 pages. Therefore they're the same. You see how that's a problem? The number of pages in a book doesn't tell us anything about what the book is about, who wrote it, what are the words, what's the message, no clue. The calories in a food also gives us no information about what's actually in the food. How is that food going to impact how I feel, my physical health, my mental health, my glucose levels. So I want to teach people about the molecules in the food. So they actually start recognizing like oh that food is going to make a spike, that food is not and teaching them hacks so they can you know improve their health.

11:15And so hack number three is called stop counting calories because essentially what I found is that if people just focus on balancing their glucose levels and using the hacks to do that and just completely stop counting calories their health improves significantly. And it's a much nicer world to live in than a world of calorie counting because something else you should know. Two people can be eating the exact same number of calories. Let's say you know 2000 calories a day. But if one person is eating in a way that causes all these spikes and the other one isn't the spikey 2000 calorie person is going to be full of cravings exhausted, enthamed, aging faster, not sleeping as well, could have mental health issues, could have PCOS, could be gaining weight like it's not the same thing.

12:01The calories are not really what matters. We need to learn about how the food is actually affecting us. Interesting. I find that so interesting because I was thinking as you were speaking you answered it there at the end that a lot of the reason why people do count calories is for weight loss or weight you know gain reasons. But because of the glucose spikes in one set of 2000 calories, one meal that will give me 2000 calories, it will have a significant impact on the insulin levels and also on how you're feeling and how you're doing and how difficult you know that fat losses or not, how much of a good time you're having along the way.

12:40That's the nuance that really you know people use calorie counting as a tool I guess but that's the nuance that's really missing if you really want to achieve any of those goals for whatever reason you have. Absolutely and then you know restricting calories. Of course like if you go from 2000 calories to I don't know how many but fewer than that, you're essentially reducing how much you're eating right so yes it's possible that'll lead to weight loss but like one that's not really sustainable like do you really want to count calories for the rest of your life like that just I don't know that feels really difficult to me and second it doesn't tell you again like what you're eating so you're reducing quantity so yeah that can lead to consequences but it might not be improving your health at all.

13:24You might be losing weight on your body but actually you know increasing the problems and the symptoms and the conditions. So I really hope people stop counting calories and through this science just kind of learn how to approach the food landscape and how to approach food habits in a way that heals them for everything we want to heal from without the sort of calorie thing. Breakfast. Yeah well you have a breakfast even. Today. Yeah. Nothing yet today I was going so I was actually I ordered food right to this this wonderful studio here in London at 10 .30 am and it said it would take half an hour to get here and it got here when you arrived.

14:07Now I looked at it and I thought if I eat this then I'm going to have some kind of like dump halfway through this conversation so it's just sat. Can I ask you what you ordered? No. Okay because some foods some breakfast foods will have that impact make you go fired. So I ordered a breakfast wrap so it's got like eggs, avocados, bacon, in it and it's like a gluten free wrap thing and I was looking at it thinking because of this bread I think the bread is probably going to make me have a dump and I don't ever want to have like a energy dump halfway through a conversation. I don't want to fall asleep you know that's rude.

14:48That would be yeah. Midway through the conversation so I've not eaten yet. Interesting. So actually you know your choices is a pretty good one in terms of glucose so the main thing we want to do to study our glucose levels is have a savory breakfast instead of a sweet one. So we want to have a breakfast that contains protein you know like eggs, fish, meat, protein powder, maybe some fat like the avocado that's fantastic and maybe some fiber if you want to add some veggies in there and then any sort of like bread or starches or potatoes should be there just for taste. It should not be the centerpiece of the breakfast and then importantly for a savory breakfast that keeps your glucose level steady we shouldn't eat anything sweet at all for breakfast except whole fruit if we want some.

15:33What's the difference between whole fruit and whatever isn't whole fruit? Ooh well you know as I explained like fruit has been bred by humans for a super long time to be extra sweet extra juicy so today when you look at an apple for example it's really been pumped full of sweetness and sugar and made really easy to eat. I had this conversation this week with my partner um she was offering me some fruit and because now I'm like a food you know arrogant little food guy because of all these conversations I've had I was like babe it's got sugar in it and they've bred it and and then she was like really and we've had a conversation about it and I googled it and I said um I googled like the historic banana, apple and the pear and I showed it she was like wow because they obviously you know the fruit we have today is so bright and big.

16:21Absolutely and easy to eat. Yeah yeah exactly you peel it you know and then I showed her some of these pitches of these old bananas and they're like tiny and they're like full of seeds and stuff. Full of seeds and tiny and actually quite tart you know. You wouldn't yeah you wouldn't really eat that many of them. No you wouldn't want to yeah. And so even though fruit has been bred for a super long time to be extra sweet if you want to eat something sweet it's still the best thing to eat because of the fiber that fruit contains and as they explain you know fiber is protective in whole in whole fruit.

16:50In whole fruit. So now here's the thing while a piece of whole fruit is the best thing to eat if you want to eat something sweet. The problem starts when we denature that piece of whole fruit. When we blend it when we juice it when we dry it when we puree it's so many different things. So let's take for example when you juice a piece of fruit. Juicing is essentially taking away all the fiber. Getting rid of all the fiber. The fiber is like the hard stuff you know the pulp and everything that's left over. So if you juice like an apple you're just taking all the sugar from the apple putting it in water and getting rid of all the protective fiber.

17:28So all of that super concentrated sugar that's been bred into that piece of fruit you're not giving to your body in a really really fast way. And as I explained the speed of delivery is really important. The faster all that sugar arrives the more your mitochondria get hurts and more the spikes are happening inflammation etc. And so when you drink apple juice you're essentially drinking like the amount of sugar in two already pretty bred apples and drinking it in a few seconds and so your body is experiencing a massive spike. And your body doesn't care whether the sugar came from a piece of fruit or if it came from like cane sugar and is in a can of Coca -Cola.

18:09The molecules and the apple juice and in the can of coke are the same. Your body does not make a difference. Your body is not like oh this sugar came from fruits. Not going to cause any issues. Oh this sugar is from Coca -Cola. Oh it's going to cause problems. Your body does not care. And in a can of fruit juice there's almost as much sugar as in a can of Coca -Cola. So when we eat fruit juice we have to do it in a way that's like okay this is desert right this is for my pleasure this is not for my health. This is gonna give me pleasure I maybe make me feel a bit happy but it's not going to help my body.

18:43Well which one of these bastards told me that fruit juice was good for me. I've been drinking this stuff like I was so you know don't go growing up. If I went and had fruit juice I was like well done Steve. Yeah. You know you've done yourself you've done future Steve a massive service there. And then I got to fucking 30 years old and people start telling me that fruit juice is bad for me. I'm like who who lied to me? Do you want to know who lied? Who? The people who make fruit juice? Yeah I thought drinking orange juice and a Nutella Cripe every morning. Well come on you need a Nutella Cripe wasn't good for you.

19:21I mean yeah but like you know I was like I'm having orange juice so it balances it out. You know I had no idea that it was just eating starches and sugars just eating a massive glucose spike for breakfast. And when you create a big glucose spike at breakfast your entire day then becomes completely like a glucose roller coaster. The breakfast spike really dictates how you're gonna be doing for the rest of the day. So what is a whole fruit? A whole fruit is like a piece of fruit that is just like a whole. Oh you mean just like not processed. Okay. Yeah like something you can hold in your hands. Okay.

19:50Buy the supermarket like an untouched from the tree. Okay I thought it's not a standard type of fruit. It's just you're talking about the state of the fruit. Yeah. Okay. Well it would be a better word for whole. No I guess that is the word. I'm just an idiot. Like a piece of I don't know. Whole is probably the right word. Okay yeah. Okay so I'm not gonna have any so granola. I used to think granola was I was like again doing my health service by eating granola. So listen if you're having a great time no symptoms feeling amazing. Top energy, no cravings, no home -wala issues, no skin issues, whatever.

20:28Yeah like if you're doing fine and you're eating things that are sweet and you're having great time I have nothing to teach you but if you're suffering in one way or another many of the symptoms we talked about earlier look at your breakfast and avoid the sweet stuff. So avoid the granolas and the breakfast cereals and the oats with banana and honey in them. Switch to something savory and I have lots of examples of what's a savory breakfast in my books but that is really going to help set your day on a much better path and going to help your physical and mental health thrive. You have these 10 hacks in your book and there was one in particular that I you know there was none of them that I thought I can do this and then there was this other one where I was lying.

21:09Let me guess. Which one do you think it is? I actually I would say the vinegar one is the other one. You're such a weirdo. How did you I'm actually a drink of vinegar before I eat? Can you imagine? Can you imagine me going to a restaurant like could I just get a glass of vinegar please before I? Well actually it's happening more and more as to your own. Why are people doing this to themselves? Okay because okay by the way by the way I hear you and by the way the hacks are there for people to pick and choose from. Okay. You're supposed to like compose with them as you wish. It's not you don't have to do everything all the time.

21:42You don't have to do any of them if you don't want to. It's like information from the science and then you decide what you do with it. Hack seven drink vinegar before you eat. Yeah. So the scientific studies show us that if we have one tablespoon of vinegar in a tall glass of water so this is a pretty good size. One tablespoon of vinegar in a tall glass of water before a meal can reduce the glucose spike of the meal by up to 30 percent and insulin spike by up to 20 percent which is important because you know insulin is also something we want to manage and you might be wondering like how the heck does that work?

22:16Well vinegar contains another cool molecule called acetic acid and acetic acid does two main things that help our glucose levels. Number one you know how I explain that starches they break down into glucose when you digest them. Well acetic acid slows down that process. So it slows down how quickly for example a piece of bread is going to break down into individual molecules. So it slows down how quickly the molecules of glucose arrive in your bloodstream which is again what we want. We want to slow down the velocity. And second acetic acid goes to your muscles and it tells your muscles to soak up glucose as it arrives into your body.

23:00So glucose arrives more stably in the bloodstream and muscles soak it up as it gets there. So those two actions reduce the spike of the meal without you needing to change any part of that meal. So if you wanted to have that cookie and you wanted to have the cookie without setting off a glucose roller coaster without setting off that sugar addiction having a vinegar drink before would be a really good idea. I think about it. Moving on, hack eight, after you eat, move. People say this, they go for walks and stuff after like the Christmas meal or whatever. But why is that from a scientific perspective important?

23:42It's interesting because it's been around culturally for a very long time, right? You like the post meal walk, etc. Even the veggie starter. I mean in France we have this thing called kuditou which is raw veggies at the beginning of a meal. We've had it for a frayer, you know, just culturally and it's a little antipasti, veggies first, etc. So it's cool to see that a lot of these hacks have been around for a very long time. But now we understand how they work. And so we're able to be like, oh, I want that back in my life. So moving after eating. So your muscles, when they contract, they need energy to do so.

24:14And the first place they look for this energy is in the glucose in your bloodstream. So we can use that to our advantage. The more muscle is contracting, the more glucose it needs. So if we use our muscles for 10 minutes after a meal, some of the glucose from that meal will make it sway to your muscles instead of just standing there and creating a spike. And so you can use your muscles in lots of different ways. You can go for a walk, you can clean your apartment, you can play with your dog, you can go to the gym, and you can do my new favorite thing, which is let's do it together, Steven. So put your feet on the ground and do some calf raises.

24:47Do you know what that is? You just like go into your tippy toes and back down calf raises and you feel your calf contracting. So this is actually a really effective way to get your muscles to soak up glucose because there's a muscle in your calf called the soleus muscle, which is really extra good at soaking up glucose. So for example, after a meal, you're at work, you're at your desk, you want to reduce the spike, do some calf raises like this. Nobody will see. You'll be helping you because that's... I think I'm so weird. They're going to see me have this shot of vinegar and then sit here like I'm like there's something in my mouth.

25:17Yeah, but then they're going to be like, damn, Steven is doing so great. Look, he's 65 and still kayaking. Like, then they might think they should have done the same. It's a good trade off. I'm happy to take the weirdness. That's really interesting because what I think about glucose spikes and movement and stuff and what you've just said there, my mind went straight to being sat on a plane, which I do a lot of. And they bring the food down, they bring the dessert trolley down or whatever. And then you eat the... Not me, of course, but someone else, a friend of mine. He ate the cookie on the dessert trolley and then he sat there for 10 hours because he was on a plane.