Jessie Inchauspé: How tiny food hacks flatten glucose spikes

Steven Bartlett 0:00 You're telling me that that will have an impact?

Jessie Inchauspé 0:01 Absolutely. And the studies prove it. It's an amazing ingredient that's been used for its health benefits. For example, it has impact on visceral fat.

Steven Bartlett 0:08 Is that belly fat?

Jessie Inchauspé 0:08 Yeah. It's the fat that's really bad for you. Yeah, you're not supposed to do that, Steven.

Steven Bartlett 0:14 Oh, gosh. The Glucose Goddess is back. Jesse Inschauspee is a biochemist and best-selling author. With a focus on nutrition and glucose management- She provides simple, science-backed tips to improve our health.

Jessie Inchauspé 0:26 80% of the population have glucose spikes every single day, and that's when problems start happening, from mental health, to acne, to faster aging, infertility and PCOS, which is one of the leading causes of infertility in women. And the problem is, we're in a situation where the food landscape is so toxic and most of us just eat sugar and starches, but they are literally made up of glucose molecules.

Steven Bartlett 0:44 Is there any such thing as good sugar?

Jessie Inchauspé 0:46 No. So even all the fruit that we find today in supermarkets is not natural, and people believe that if the sugar is coming from a fruit, for example, in a fruit smoothie, that that's good sugar, but that's a total lie. And your body doesn't differentiate whether the sugar is in a fruit smoothie or the sugar is in a chocolate cake.

Steven Bartlett 1:01 Are there any foods that have surprised you when you tested them?

Jessie Inchauspé 1:04 Yes. I think the biggest ones are ...

Steven Bartlett 1:07 Wow. This begs the question then, is there a healthy way to consume sugar?

Jessie Inchauspé 1:10 So these are four hacks that people can implement in their lives and you're able to reduce your glucose spikes while still eating what you love.

Steven Bartlett 1:16 And you took these hacks and did an experiment?

Jessie Inchauspé 1:19 Yes. And 90% of people reduced their cravings, really significant impacts on sleep, hormones, mood, on diabetes.

Steven Bartlett 1:26 And it says here roughly 40% of people who wanted to lose weight did in fact lose weight.

Jessie Inchauspé 1:29 Yep.

Steven Bartlett 1:29 So what are the hacks?

Jessie Inchauspé 1:31 The first one is ...

Steven Bartlett 1:35 This is a sentence I never thought I'd say in my life. Um, we've just hit seven million subscribers on YouTube and I wanna say a huge thank you to all of you that show up here every Monday and Thursday to watch our conversations. Um, from the bottom of my heart, but also on behalf of my team who you don't always get to meet, there's almost 50 people now behind The Diary of a CEO that worked to put this together. So, from all of us, thank you so much. Um, we did a raffle last month and we gave away prizes for people that subscribed to the show up until seven million subscribers, and you guys loved that raffle so much that we're gonna continue it. So every single month we're giving away money can't buy prizes, including meetings with me, invites to our events, and £1,000 gift vouchers to anyone that subscribes to The Diary of a CEO. There's now more than seven million of you, so if you make the decision to subscribe today, you can be one of those lucky people. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. Let's get to the conversation. Jesse Inschauspee,

Steven Bartlett 2:30 the Glucose Goddess. We spoke two years ago, and in that time I feel like there's been a real glucose revolution, m- much of which has been led by you. Your books have sold millions and millions and millions of copies around the world. Your conversations online have millions and millions and millions and millions of views, more than I could possibly count. What's going on with glucose?

Jessie Inchauspé 2:51 The thing is, glucose has always been incredibly important to our health, but it's been going on behind the scenes. But now with the technology that we have, glucose monitors, new science, we're actually able to get a real good handle on it and understand our diet through that lens. So most of us, Steven, have unhealthy glucose levels. To give you an example, one billion people in the world have either type 2 diabetes or pre-diabetes. One billion, and that number is increasing every single day. And then in people who don't have any health issues, up to 80% of the population still has glucose spikes every single day. And this leads to lots of symptoms, from mental health problems, to infertility, to acne, to faster aging. Glucose is really important and I'm really happy that we're talking about it more.

Steven Bartlett 3:39 What have you... Have you been surprised by how much people have woken up to glucose sugar?

Jessie Inchauspé 3:44 Yeah, definitely. I think even the word glucose, people used to know blood sugar, but now the fact that people know what glucose is makes me quite happy. That's the scientific way to refer to blood sugar. It's surprising, but the thing is like I'm on the inside. I'm working every single day to make sure people know what glucose is, so it's like, you know, when you put the frog in the water and then you slowly boil the water, you know that image?

Steven Bartlett 4:04 Mm-hmm.

Jessie Inchauspé 4:04 And the frog doesn't notice the water is boiling? That's how I feel because I've been doing this for five years now. So I can tell now if I compare today to five years ago, there's been a huge shift, but I've been looking at it every single day, day by day, and the increase has been very gradual.

Steven Bartlett 4:20 How do you define yourself? There's this sort of name you go under, the Glucose Goddess-

Jessie Inchauspé 4:26 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 4:26 But professionally, if someone says, "What do you do?"

Jessie Inchauspé 4:29 Hmm.

Steven Bartlett 4:30 How do you define that? What would you say?

Jessie Inchauspé 4:30 I say I'm a biochemist.

Steven Bartlett 4:32 Okay.

Jessie Inchauspé 4:32 I'm a biochemist passionate about sharing science in a fun, accessible, sexy way. That's what I like to do.

Steven Bartlett 4:39 These CGMs-

Jessie Inchauspé 4:40 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 4:40 ... continuous glucose monitors that everybody seems to be wearing these days-

Jessie Inchauspé 4:45 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 4:45 They're much of the r- the reason people, I guess, know you?

Jessie Inchauspé 4:51 Mm.

Steven Bartlett 4:51 Because you post these incredible graphs on your Instagram showing-

Jessie Inchauspé 4:55 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 4:55 ... the impact that the, of the things we, on our glucose levels.

Jessie Inchauspé 4:59 Yep.

Steven Bartlett 4:59 I wanna start there.

Steven Bartlett 5:01 When I eat something sweet-

Jessie Inchauspé 5:02 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 5:02 ... and full of sugar, there's a spike in my CGM, so my continuous glucose monitor. Does, does the spike mean that something bad is going on in my body?

Jessie Inchauspé 5:14 Kind of, yeah. So I'll go just one step back. There's lots of different categories of foods, but there are two that impact our blood sugar levels. It's starches, so that's bread, rice, pasta, potatoes, oats, and sugars, so anything sweet from an apple pie to an orange juice. These two categories of foods, they are literally made up of glucose molecules, so when you eat them, they break down into individual glucose molecules and the glucose molecules arrive into your blood. If you eat a lot of starches and sugars at once, a lot of glucose molecules are arriving into your blood and that's what you see. That's the spike you see on your glucose monitor. Now these spikes have a few different consequences. You know, having a few spikes here and there is not a big deal, but if you have really big spikes, which I think most of us are discovering we have even if we don't have diabetes, that's when problems start happening. And there's basically three processes that take place in your body when you spike. It's chronic fatigue of your mitochondria.... aging, glycation, and then insulin release. And I can go into detail into these but, these are what underpin all the negative consequences of glucose spikes.

Steven Bartlett 6:23 So start with that first one-

Jessie Inchauspé 6:24 Okay.

Steven Bartlett 6:24 ... the mitochondria.

Jessie Inchauspé 6:25 So there's these little factories in your cells that are in charge of making energy. You must have learned this at school, you know the mitochondria is the factory of the cell. These little mitochondria are constantly trying to make energy for your body and they turn glucose into energy. So you give them glucose through food, they turn it into energy, and then your brain uses the energy, your heart to pump, your ears to listen, your eyes to see. Your whole body uses this energy. And so you might think, "Okay. I want lots of energy, so I should give my mitochondria lots of glucose." That's the logical conclusion you might come to.

Steven Bartlett 6:59 I think so.

Jessie Inchauspé 6:59 But that's where it completely collapses. See, biology is a bit weird. Take the example of a plant. Do you have any plants at home?

Steven Bartlett 7:05 I do, yeah.

Jessie Inchauspé 7:05 Okay. Are you able to keep them alive?

Steven Bartlett 7:07 Um, my cleaner does a great job of keeping all of them alive.

Jessie Inchauspé 7:10 (laughs) I have a super hard time.

Steven Bartlett 7:11 (laughs)

Jessie Inchauspé 7:12 The, the reason that I'm bringing up plants is because you know that plants need some water to live. But if you give them too much water, they drown and they die. The human body is kind of the same. Some glucose, amazing steady energy. Too much glucose, and your little mitochondria start freaking out. They get overwhelmed by too much glucose arriving their way. They kind of go on strike. And I'm French, so I know. But they sort of go on strike and they get overwhelmed and stressed out, and they're not able to make energy effectively anymore 'cause we're overloading them with too much glucose to process. And as a human, what do you feel? You feel chronic fatigue. You wake up, you're exhausted. Thinking of going to the grocery store or picking up your kids is super tiring. There's this energy system in your body is just kind of broken. But you keep eating carbs, you know, a croissant, some bread, something sweet, but you keep being more and more tired. That's your mitochondria dysfunctioning. So that's the first thing that happens when you spike. You get tired. Your mitochondria get stressed out. And one thing that's interesting is that sometimes when we eat something sweet, especially in the morning, like an orange juice, we kind of feel a sense of like a, like a rush of energy. You know you have a big glass of orange juice and you sort of perk up for a sec? Most people think that that is energy. What's actually going on is that sugar releases dopamine in the brain, and it's the pleasure molecule. It's the same molecule that gets released when you have sex, when you play video games, when you do illegal drugs. Sugar releases dopamine. It's pleasure. It makes you kind of feel awake just briefly. But actually, that's not energy because on the inside, your mitochondria are being damaged. So we're being tricked by sugary foods, and when we're tired, we often reach for something sugary to perk us up, but it doesn't work on the inside. So that's the first thing.

Steven Bartlett 9:02 Mm-hmm.

Jessie Inchauspé 9:03 Your mitochondria gets stressed out. And as your mitochondria gets stressed out, they also release what's called free radicals, which is something that increases inflammation in the body, and inflammation is really nasty thing we'll get to in a sec. The second thing that happens when you spike has to do with a chicken cooking in the oven. So if you put... You're looking at me weird, but let me explain. If you put a chicken in the oven, it goes from pink to brown, right? You've seen this. It cooks. This process of cooking is called glycation. It's the process of browning or of cooking. Same thing when you toast a piece of toast, for example. The interesting thing is, a human being from the moment we're born, we're slowly cooking in that same way on the inside. We're slowly glycating. We're slowly browning. And then when we're fully glycated, when we're fully cooked, we die. That's why when you look at the cartilage of babies, it's white, and if you look at the cartilage of somebody who's 90 years old, it's brown. They've cooked on the inside. And every glucose spike increases... You're looking at

Jessie Inchauspé 10:10 your skin? (laughs)

Steven Bartlett 10:10 Yeah. (inaudible) (laughs)

Jessie Inchauspé 10:13 We'd have to, like, open you up and look at your cartilage color. (laughs)

Steven Bartlett 10:16 I've got about 10 minutes left. (laughs)

Jessie Inchauspé 10:19 I know, Steven. And every glucose spike increases this process of glycation. So much so that glucose and glycation, they kind of sound like a similar word, glucose, glycation. It's because it's glucose doing the glycating. So every glucose spike increases glycation, increases cooking, ac- accelerates aging, and this shows on your skin, you get wrinkles faster if you glycate more, and also on the inside, your organs slowly get damaged. So glucose spikes, mitochondria get tired, you age faster. In response to this, your body knows, Steven, that a big glucose spike is not good for you. Your body knows that it has to do something to try to get that glucose level down. So what it does, it calls up your pancreas and it's like, "Yo, pancreas, we got a glucose spike going on. We need to get this glucose down." In response, your pancreas sends a hormone called insulin out in your body. You've heard of insulin before, right?

Steven Bartlett 11:18 Mm-hmm.

Jessie Inchauspé 11:19 And insulin's job, and we love her, her job is to grab all these excess glucose molecules and to store them away so they don't damage your body anymore. And insulin stores glucose away into your liver, into your muscles, and then when those are full, insulin stores glucose away into your fat cells, and that's one of the ways that you gain fat on your body. It's in response to the spikes in your body trying to protect you from the spikes. The problem is insulin itself has consequences and is the driver of type 2 diabetes and insulin resistance. So to answer your question, yes, when you see a big spike on your glucose monitor, there's some of that going on. And the more spikes you have, the harder it is gonna be for your body to manage your spikes, so it kind of becomes a vicious cycle. If you keep eating the same way, your spikes will get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger over time with more and more damage.

Steven Bartlett 12:14 On that last point about where insulin stores the excess glucose-

Jessie Inchauspé 12:18 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 12:18 ... does that mean that if I have more muscle mass, I'm-... better at eating sugary products?

Jessie Inchauspé 12:24 Yup. And that's why, if you really love cookies, the best time to eat them is right after you work out or right before you work out because your muscles are really hungry for glucose all the time and the bigger your muscles are, the more you use them, the more they're gonna capture some of that glucose for energy.

Steven Bartlett 12:40 S- okay. So, me and my partner, we both go to the gym, and she is significantly smaller than me in every way. She's, she's short. She's, you know, she's lean. Um, I'm bigger than her. I have, I have more muscle mass.

Jessie Inchauspé 12:52 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 12:52 That means that if I have one cookie-

Jessie Inchauspé 12:53 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 12:53 ... and she has the exact same cookie, then her glucose response is gonna be potentially significantly different to mine.

Jessie Inchauspé 12:59 Yes, potentially. So if you just look at muscle mass, since you have more muscle mass, you'll be able to handle that cookie better. But there's so many things that influence glucose response. For example, your level of hydration, how stressed you are, your microbiome, your genetics, what time of the month you're in when you're a female, how well you've slept last night. I mean, there's a few factors. So, if you were just to compare your spike to hers, you couldn't really draw any s- conclusions because there's so many confounding variables.

Steven Bartlett 13:27 Those confounding variables-

Jessie Inchauspé 13:29 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 13:29 ... give me a window into some of them and why they matter and how they have an impact on my glucose response.

Jessie Inchauspé 13:34 So, I think muscle is a really good example, right? If two people eat the same exact cookie, the person with more muscle mass is going to potentially see a smaller glucose spike because their muscles are gonna absorb more of that glucose and faster. If you look at genetics, some people are better at growing their fat cells and at growing the number and the size of their fat cells, so they have a bigger reservoir to put glucose in. People of South Asian descent, for example, they tend to have a harder time putting on fat cells and as a result, their glucose spikes tend to be bigger 'cause they don't have that storage unit that they can access and increase the size of. Does that make sense?

Steven Bartlett 14:12 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jessie Inchauspé 14:12 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 14:13 A- are there any foods that you have been surprised at when you've tested them?

Jessie Inchauspé 14:18 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 14:18 Because this is one of the really shocking things that I discovered when I wore a continuous glucose monitor, is I would eat some things that I've been eating for a long, long time and they would cause a spike, and I was like, "What? I thought that was healthy."

Jessie Inchauspé 14:31 (laughs) Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 14:32 Um, but what are those things, I guess for the general-

Jessie Inchauspé 14:34 The surprising ones?

Steven Bartlett 14:35 Yeah, the surprising ones. Not just for you, but for people that message you and go, "Oh my God, Jessie-"

Jessie Inchauspé 14:39 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 14:39 "... I've been lied to about my tomato ketchup," or-

Jessie Inchauspé 14:41 Okay. I think the biggest ones are honey and grapes.

Steven Bartlett 14:44 Okay.

Jessie Inchauspé 14:45 So, grapes first. You think, "It's a fruit. It's healthy. It's natural. It's good for me, right?" Well, actually, all the fruit that we find today in supermarkets is not natural. It is the product of human breeding for thousands and thousands of years to make them extra sweet, extra juicy. In the same way that humans have been breeding dogs from the time of the gray wolves into Chihuahuas and golden retrievers, these are not natural types of dogs. We've bred wolves into these dogs. Fruit is the same thing. We've bred pieces of fruit to make these beautiful grapes without any seeds and just this little pocket of sugar. And so a grape, when you look at it, actually, is just a big dose of sugar. It's in the fruit format so people think it's good for them, but actually, when it comes to your glucose levels, it's just big glucose spike. So those are really surprising.

Steven Bartlett 15:36 All fruits?

Jessie Inchauspé 15:38 It varies, right? So for example, berries are lower in sugar, so create a smaller spike, but any tropical fruit like bananas, mangoes, papayas, and then grapes, also, those are really high in sugar. Yeah. But the thing is, you know, a piece of whole fruit is okay because it has fiber in it. The real problem comes when you denature that piece of fruit and you turn it into a juice, for example, 'cause then you're removing that protective fiber and just extracting the water and the sugar.

Steven Bartlett 16:05 Yeah. I've not drank a glass of juice since starting this podcast because so many people-

Jessie Inchauspé 16:08 Good.

Steven Bartlett 16:08 ... I've spoken to have told me-

Jessie Inchauspé 16:09 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 16:09 ... that it's just like drinking sugar water.

Jessie Inchauspé 16:11 Yeah. It's just like drinking a can of Coke. But people think, "Well, it comes from a piece of fruit, so it's natural." Orange juice comes from oranges. Therefore-

Steven Bartlett 16:18 Mm-hmm.

Jessie Inchauspé 16:18 ... it's good for you because it's natural. What they don't realize is that the sugar in a can of soda is also natural. It comes from sugar beets-

Steven Bartlett 16:26 Mm-hmm.

Jessie Inchauspé 16:26 ... or canes. So if you're really looking at the source of the sugar, you realize it doesn't matter at all. They all come from plants. What matters is the concentration and the medium that the sugar

Jessie Inchauspé 16:36 is in.

Steven Bartlett 16:37 I understand grapes causing a glucose spike-

Jessie Inchauspé 16:40 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 16:40 ... because when I taste it, it tastes sweet. But there's some things that I eat that don't taste sweet that cause a glucose spike, and those are the things that I think lie to me.

Jessie Inchauspé 16:48 Like bread?

Steven Bartlett 16:49 Like bread.

Jessie Inchauspé 16:50 Right. Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 16:50 Like rice.

Jessie Inchauspé 16:51 Yeah. Well, the thing is, glucose is actually not sweet. What you're tasting in fruit is fructose. So let me explain. So starches like bread, pasta, rice, potatoes, oats, those are starches. Those are literally millions of glucose molecules just attached hand to hand like this. That's a starch. It's just a long chain of glucose. When you eat the starch, poof, it turns into individual glucose molecules, raises your blood sugar even though it doesn't taste sweet. In a piece of fruit or in sugar, you're not eating starch. What you're eating is sucrose, a different kind of molecule, which is half glucose, half fructose.

Steven Bartlett 17:32 Oh.

Jessie Inchauspé 17:33 Yeah. So when it breaks down, it gives you glucose and a spike, but also fructose that tastes really sweet but doesn't raise your blood sugar levels that much.

Steven Bartlett 17:42 So I get... On the other side of the coin then, are there foods that taste sweet but don't have an impact on my glucose?

Jessie Inchauspé 17:47 Yes. Sweeteners, stevia, aspartame, things like that.

Steven Bartlett 17:52 So are you saying that I should put sweeteners in my food, as opposed to sugar?

Jessie Inchauspé 17:58 Well, I think people need to realize that even though sweeteners are not super good for us, right, of course it's better to drink water than a diet soda. The diet soda is better for you than the regular can of soda with the 30 grams of real sugar in there. I personally would never have a can of real soda. I would always have the diet soda, always, always, always, because those sweeteners don't raise your blood sugar levels, okay? They don't create that big spike and that big insulin spike and then the drop.

Steven Bartlett 18:26 Is there such a good thing as good sugar?

Jessie Inchauspé 18:28 Hmm.

Steven Bartlett 18:30 Is there any such thing as good sugar?

Jessie Inchauspé 18:32 No. People often believe that if the sugar is coming from a fruit and is for, is, for example, in a fruit smoothie that they might have in the morning, that's good sugar, but that sugar that's in a cake is bad sugar. So people tend to compare these two and say, "Oh, well, I'm having a fruit smoothie, that's good for me, but, oh, that chocolate cake would be bad for me." That's a total lie. It's all the same molecules. The molecules in that fruit smoothie and the molecules in that chocolate cake are the same. It's sucrose. It's the same stuff, and your body doesn't differentiate whether the sugar is in a fruit smoothie or the sugar is in a chocolate cake. So all sugar is the same. Even, you know, honey, agave, maple syrup, all these things that have these health halos because of marketing, it's all the same molecules. So I recommend that people just have the sugar that they like best. Don't think that one is gonna be better for you than the other. And have all sugar as dessert. So that fruit smoothie, that's also dessert. It's not super healthy 'cause it comes from fruit. It's just like the chocolate cake.

Steven Bartlett 19:33 And are there, is there such a thing as good sweeteners and bad sweeteners?

Jessie Inchauspé 19:36 Yeah, so there's a few categories. So the ones that seem to be really fine for us are stevia, monk fruit, and allulose. The ones that have been linked to quite a few health issues are aspartame, maltitol, sucralose. So for example, aspartame, you usually find it in soda, whereas stevia, you might buy a little packet at home and put it in your tea. That being said, the aspartame is still better for you than the real can of Coke with the 30 grams of real sugar.

Steven Bartlett 20:06 So stevia is something that I shouldn't be too concerned about?

Jessie Inchauspé 20:08 No, stevia is good. Yeah, you shouldn't be, be too concerned. Do you use stevia?

Steven Bartlett 20:11 I don't put any sweeteners in anything. I don't put sugar in anything either.

Jessie Inchauspé 20:14 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 20:14 So I'm trying to stay away.

Jessie Inchauspé 20:15 Nice.

Steven Bartlett 20:15 When I have coffee, it's just black coffee.

Jessie Inchauspé 20:17 You don't even eat chocolate?

Steven Bartlett 20:18 Of course I-

Jessie Inchauspé 20:19 Oh.

Steven Bartlett 20:20 Chocolate, maybe not so much. Maybe that's not my thing, but, you know.

Jessie Inchauspé 20:23 What's your sweet thing?

Steven Bartlett 20:24 Carrot cake.

Jessie Inchauspé 20:25 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 20:26 What's your sweet thing?

Jessie Inchauspé 20:26 Oh, chocolate. I love chocolate. Like my favorite is, is like chocolate ice cream with a chocolate brownie and chocolate sauce and chocolate sprinkles. Anything chocolate is really good.

Steven Bartlett 20:35 That's not very glucose goddess.

Jessie Inchauspé 20:36 Well, here's where you're wrong, Steven.

Steven Bartlett 20:38 Okay.

Jessie Inchauspé 20:38 I'm actually not anti-sugar.

Steven Bartlett 20:40 What are you talking about?

Jessie Inchauspé 20:41 No, I love sugar. I eat sugar, I eat carbs all the time, but I want people to know what I know, which is how and when to eat those things.

Steven Bartlett 20:49 That's the end of the podcast. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Jessie Inchauspé 20:51 From the maximum (laughs) ...

Steven Bartlett 20:51 It's really gonna be great to see you again. (laughs)

Jessie Inchauspé 20:54 (laughs) No, but seriously, we need to learn how to eat these things 'cause they're so delicious in a way that's less bad for our health. It's not about cutting them out, that would be a diet. I don't, I'm not, I'm not pro diets, I'm pro knowledge, and I wanna make sure people are not having sugar and dessert for breakfast. You know, sweet cereal in the morning and orange juice, that's dessert. Anyway, I'm all about just trying to empower people with the information so they don't get trapped by these marketing lies.

Steven Bartlett 21:19 Are we meant to be eating the amounts of sugar that we eat though?

Jessie Inchauspé 21:23 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 21:23 Like, are we meant to be eating any sugar? Is, what does our sort of evolutionary history tell us about our relationship with glucose?

Jessie Inchauspé 21:29 I think fruit is something we're meant to be eating, but the fruit that used to exist was less sweet and harder to digest and more fibrous. And then in terms of starches, starches are totally fine to eat. The problem is today most of us just eat sugar and starches. We've completely lost touch with the nice proteins and the organ meats and the fiber and the healthy fats. We're in a situation where the food landscape is so toxic and it's so just starches and sugars that people are getting sicker and sicker and sicker, and it's addictive, and it's cheap. So we're in a very difficult situation, and that's the situation that, you know, the GLP-1s are trying to solve, uh, we're in a pickle. We are in a pickle.

Steven Bartlett 22:08 Are you optimistic about the pickle we're in as it relates to sugar and glucose?

Jessie Inchauspé 22:13 (exhales deeply) I have to say yes because the amount of transformations I see in my readers is really encouraging. You know, people are reclaiming their health, getting power over it, understanding food again. But we've got a lot of work to do, and I can do my work educating people from the ground up on these hacks, but we also need like systemic change. We need policy, we need governments to get involved, and we need to find ways to make healthier food 'cause we're just killing the population right now. It's really terrible.

Steven Bartlett 22:41 So talking about some of the consequences of a high glucose diet-

Jessie Inchauspé 22:47 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 22:47 ... one of them you mentioned earlier when we were talking about glycation is aging.

Jessie Inchauspé 22:51 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 22:52 Has anyone ever done any research to prove that a high glucose diet is associated or correlated with increased or accelerated aging?

Jessie Inchauspé 23:02 I mean, yes, because we see that the people who eat the most sugar get the most diseases, right? So we see correlations, but they're not, they're not like a clinical trial. You can't take two populations and say, "Okay, everybody's 30 years old. We're gonna give this half a healthy no glucose spike diet and this half glucose spikes every single day. And then we'll see when they're 80, you know, which group has aged faster." We can't do that. That's unethical. So we have to look at correlations-

Steven Bartlett 23:27 Mm-hmm.

Jessie Inchauspé 23:28 ... and we see things like if you have really high glucose levels, high insulin levels, you're more likely to get heart disease, dementia, depression, et cetera, et cetera. We have correlative studies, and we understand the mechanism of the glycation.

Steven Bartlett 23:42 What about the superficial signs of aging? Wrinkles in skin and-

Jessie Inchauspé 23:44 Oh, like the wrinkles? A lot of skincare products actually target glycation from the outside in. So they'll put like antioxidants on your skin to, to reduce glycation. If you're in the skincare world, you'll see glycation mentioned everywhere. What they don't do is they don't look at how to reduce glycation from the inside out, which is what I think is more interesting. And it's through food. By reducing your glucose levels, you reduce glycation. It's just like a A to B. It's very simple.

Steven Bartlett 24:10 So if I want to stave off wrinkles-

Jessie Inchauspé 24:13 (laughs)

Steven Bartlett 24:13 ... then I should keep my glucose levels down?

Jessie Inchauspé 24:15 Yes, and you should also avoid smoking, you know, wear sunscreen, et cetera. But in terms of your diet, what you wanna focus on is focus on reducing glucose spikes. Yeah, absolutely.

Steven Bartlett 24:24 What about things like acne and skin conditions? Spots?

Jessie Inchauspé 24:27 So those are more inflammatory-based diseases. So eczema, psoriasis, acne, rosacea, those are expressions of inflammation going on.... within your body. And I like to think of the skin as a mirror to what's going on within. And so inflammation can happen to loads of different factors, but one of the factors is glucose spikes. So, glucose spikes hurts our mitochondria, that creates inflammation. Then glucose spikes lead to glycation, which also leads to inflammation and insulin release, and a lot of insulin also increases inflammation. So, with every glucose spike, you're increasing inflammation within your body. And if you're susceptible to any of these skin conditions, you can have flare-ups or increase their intensity very simply.

Steven Bartlett 25:11 And does it also have an impact on my hormonal balance? I am ... A lot of my friends, I'm in that age range now where a lot of my friends are trying to have children.

Jessie Inchauspé 25:19 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 25:19 And there's so much talk around things like polycystic ovary syndrome and fertility and sp-, you know, infertility in men with their sperm and all these kind of things.

Jessie Inchauspé 25:30 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 25:30 Is there a link between glucose and hormones and fertility?

Jessie Inchauspé 25:34 Yes. So, we have studies that show that the more insulin resistant you are, so insulin resistance is a consequence of just a lot of insulin in the body, the more likely you are to be infertile. And then we also know that PCOS, so polycystic ovarian syndrome, which is one of the leading causes of infertility in women, we know that 60% of PCOS cases also are people who have insulin resistance. There's a link there. Insulin resistant, you're more likely to have PCOS. And we also know that when there's a lot of insulin in a female body, it tells your ovaries to produce more testosterone. Testosterone is the male sex hormone, and if you have too much male sex hormone in the body, that causes issues. It can cause acne, it can cause balding or hair growth on the face, and it can stop your period. Now often, when somebody has PCOS, they're given the birth control pill, which kind of makes sense on the surface, but really doesn't solve anything. What happens when you take the birth control pill is that you're just ingesting female hormones. That's what the pill is, it's female hormones. So, if you have high testosterone, all of a sudden you're ingesting female hormones so the balance kind of comes back to an okay situation. Your symptoms of excess testosterone go away. But as soon as you stop the pill, the high testosterone is still there. So, a lot of people stop the pill trying to have a baby and they're like, "Oh, I don't have my period. I have PCOS. What do I do?" So, one recommendation I have is if you have PCOS, look at your glucose spikes first. It's not the only reason this can happen, but very often when you fix your glucose and insulin levels, the symptoms of PCOS go away.

Steven Bartlett 27:15 I, I once saw something on Twitter a couple of weeks ago that was trying to make the case that glucose and insulin responses are the reason for PCOS.

Jessie Inchauspé 27:25 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 27:26 Some people believe that.

Jessie Inchauspé 27:27 Totally. And, you know, it's very politically charged, uh, topic. Some people believe you have PCOS, it's genetic, you can't do anything about it. Other people believe, no, no, it's a metabolic disease. It's a cluster of symptoms that come from high insulin. I'm in that camp. But, you know, there are some cases where somebody has PCOS and doesn't have high insulin levels, so what category do they go into? The thing with PCOS, Steven, is that it's not a real condition. It's like a cluster of symptoms, so some people could have PCOS and have cystic ovaries and balding. Somebody else could have PCOS and have, you know, missed periods and hair growth on their chin. So, it can take different forms, so I think we're starting to understand there are v- there are variations of PCOS, and some are in the insulin resistant category.

Steven Bartlett 28:11 Have you seen a woman resu- reverse her PCOS symptoms?

Jessie Inchauspé 28:15 Tons. In my second book, I ran a study. Three females who were in the program doing my hacks for just a month, got their period back and were able to get pregnant in that month just with my hacks. I see PCOS reversal all the time.

Steven Bartlett 28:32 So, these hacks-

Jessie Inchauspé 28:33 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 28:33 ... that you, you say those three women used to help reverse their, their PCOS symptoms-

Jessie Inchauspé 28:39 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 28:39 ... what are the hacks?

Jessie Inchauspé 28:40 Oh, the hacks. Uh-

Steven Bartlett 28:42 What are the ones that they did?

Jessie Inchauspé 28:43 So, the ones they did were savory breakfast, vinegar once a day, veggie starters, and moving after eating. And these are four hacks that are the four most important ones of my 10 hacks that I've put together in The 4 Week Method, that second book. And if you do these hacks, you don't actually have to change anything else that you're eating. You don't have to cut out anything. You just add these in. I like to see them like, um, little fairy godmothers that you have in your pocket and you just put throughout your day like this, and you're able to reduce your glucose spikes while still eating what you love in a very low efforts kind of way. And I believe these hacks should be seen like you would see brush your teeth, wear sunscreen, drink enough water, have a savory breakfast, move

Jessie Inchauspé 29:31 after eating.

Steven Bartlett 29:31 Have a savory breakfast. So, are you saying people shouldn't be eating sugar for breakfast?

Jessie Inchauspé 29:35 Correct. So, the concept of a savory breakfast comes from the simple realization that if you have a breakfast that creates a big glucose spike, you're affecting your body in many bad ways. First of all, you're leading to your brain not functioning too well during that day. It's leading to brain fog. It can make you a bit confused. Second, it makes you tired. It increases cravings throughout the day, and it also deregulates your glucose levels for the rest of the day. Your breakfast is very powerful. If you have a glucose spike at breakfast, your whole day is a glucose rollercoaster. So, what you wanna do, Steven, is always have a savory breakfast that keeps your glucose level steady. A savory breakfast is what? It's based around protein, eggs, uh, fish, meat, uh, tofu, nuts, dairy, protein powder, dinner leftovers. Okay? Protein. It's really important to have protein in the morning. Then you add some healthy fats, olive oil, butter, avocado. And then if you want, for taste, you can add a bit of starch, like a piece of bread, for example, or some potatoes. Importantly, a savory breakfast contains nothing sweet. No cereal, no muffins, no orange juice, no granola, no, uh, fruit puree, none of that. It's really key.

Steven Bartlett 30:50 Sugar in my coffee?

Jessie Inchauspé 30:52 No.No, no, no. If you want sugar, have it as dessert after a meal, after lunch or after dinner 'cause after your lunch and after your dinner, you have lots of food already in the digestive system, so any sugar you put in afterwards is gonna impact your glucose levels less.

Steven Bartlett 31:08 You said that if I have something sweet for my breakfast, I'm then gonna be on a glucose roller coaster.

Jessie Inchauspé 31:13 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 31:13 Why?

Jessie Inchauspé 31:14 Because glucose spike, then insulin comes out and your glucose drop then your glucose are low. Here, you get really hungry. You have a lot of cravings. When our glucose levels are dropping, scientists have shown it increases the activity of the craving center in our brain. So, it goes like, "Steven, eat some sugar." And you can't control that. So, what do you do? You reach for more sugar. Bam, another glucose spike, and then you just continue your whole day like that. So, you sort of put yourself into a corner if you start your day with a spike, and it's really difficult to get off that roller coaster.

Steven Bartlett 31:50 Does that roller coaster last across days?

Jessie Inchauspé 31:54 Good question. Generally, during the night, it sort of resets.

Steven Bartlett 31:57 In my glucose test, I saw that when I go to sleep, it kind of flattens out, kind of goes quite low at nighttime. However, I've got this unscientific observation where if I start, if I had a carrot cake now, um, there's a high probability that I probably wanna have a carrot cake by dinnertime tonight as well.

Jessie Inchauspé 32:15 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 32:15 And then when I wake up the next day, I probably, I'm gonna be more likely to go for the carrot cake again.

Jessie Inchauspé 32:20 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 32:20 And I, if I, if I zoomed out on my life, say the whole 12 months of the year-

Jessie Inchauspé 32:25 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 32:25 ... there will be maybe like, this little week or two-

Jessie Inchauspé 32:29 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 32:29 ... in clusters-

Jessie Inchauspé 32:30 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 32:30 ... where maybe there's a couple of months in between, and then there's this, this two-week fucking splurge again where I find it really hard not to reach for something across multiple days.

Jessie Inchauspé 32:39 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 32:39 And I'm not sure if this is in my head.

Jessie Inchauspé 32:41 I think there's a few things going on. One, the taste is really addictive, so you get addicted to getting that taste and getting the dopamine. Don't forget, there's the dopamine rush in your brain.

Steven Bartlett 32:49 Mm-hmm.

Jessie Inchauspé 32:49 Second, with every glucose spike, you're actually deregulating your hunger hormones. So, you get, you have more cravings, you're hungrier, and yes, this can totally last for a few days. And I think thirdly, if you have the carrot cake at home for a few days, maybe you're just more likely to reach for it 'cause it's there, you know? But I feel, I feel similarly to you, I have these phases, especially if I'm really busy and I can't do all the hacks all the time where I'm eating a bunch of sugar-

Steven Bartlett 33:11 Mm-hmm.

Jessie Inchauspé 33:11 ... and then it lasts until I say, "Okay, stop. Back on the hacks," and I do the hacks for two days, and then I'm good again.

Steven Bartlett 33:17 That's the same with me.

Jessie Inchauspé 33:18 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 33:18 But also, I find that if I do a really big workout-

Jessie Inchauspé 33:21 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 33:21 ... for me, it helps to break that cycle.

Jessie Inchauspé 33:23 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 33:23 So if I, this weekend I did a real, I was, I think I was in that cycle of like, I wasn't reaching for sugar as in like, something sweet. I was reaching for like, I was having a lot of like toast with my breakfast.

Jessie Inchauspé 33:33 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 33:33 Or I was having like, carbs.

Jessie Inchauspé 33:35 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 33:35 And then I did a really big workout, and the last thing I wanted was anything with carbs in or glucose.

Jessie Inchauspé 33:40 I think it's also in the brain, you know, 'cause you're rebalancing those hormones, that dopamine. You're getting endorphins from the workout, so you're not seeking all that pleasure from just sugar.

Steven Bartlett 33:50 Okay.

Jessie Inchauspé 33:50 I think if you're in a cycle where all you're just getting dopamine from sugar, it just becomes addictive. And you have to do stuff in your life that allows you to feel good in your brain without having that sugar.

Steven Bartlett 33:58 So, maybe I got the dopamine from the workout instead.

Jessie Inchauspé 34:01 Yeah, totally.

Steven Bartlett 34:02 And so I kind of shifted-

Jessie Inchauspé 34:03 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 34:04 ... the source of dopamine. So, that was the first hack-

Jessie Inchauspé 34:06 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 34:06 ... which is the-

Jessie Inchauspé 34:07 Savory breakfast.

Steven Bartlett 34:08 ... savory breakfast.

Jessie Inchauspé 34:08 Super key. By the way, if you just do one hack, do this one. It is a complete game changer. And a savory breakfast should keep you satiated for four hours, which is a long time. Most people get hungry again two hours after they have breakfast, so make sure you're having enough protein in your breakfast to stay full for four hours.

Steven Bartlett 34:28 Okay, on that.

Jessie Inchauspé 34:29 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 34:29 What if I fast?

Jessie Inchauspé 34:31 Totally fine. Make sure the first meal of your day is also savory. So, it can be at 8:00 AM, it can be at 4:00 PM. I do not care as long as the first thing that you eat is something savory 'cause when you're fasted, your digestive system is super empty and sensitive. So, whatever you give it, whether it's in the morning after just sleeping or whether it's after a two-week fast, it's gonna go really quickly into your bloodstream. So, you have to be cautious and make sure you're not giving your body glucose. Otherwise, big spike.

Steven Bartlett 34:58 Do you think fasting is good for you? Intermittent fasting?

Jessie Inchauspé 35:03 (sighs) I think it's nuanced. I think what I've seen is that in men, it just works way better. In females, it can kind of mess up your hormones. You have to be a bit, um, judicious about when you fast, and we also have to remember, guys, fasting is a stressor on the body. It is a good stressor, but it is a stressor. So, if you have an intense job, kids to take care of, you drink coffee, you have, you know, three times a week you do hit cardio, then you do a sauna, then you do a cold plunge, then you fast, your body is gonna freak the fuck out. You have to like, (laughs) dose these stressors in a way that is gonna be manageable for your body. I see lots of women who do all those things I just mentioned, and then they're like, "And I don't have my period, and I don't understand it. I don't feel good." I'm like, "Your body is freaking out. Like, relax. You can't be putting all these stressors on yourself all the time." So, I fast when I'm on vacation.

Steven Bartlett 35:57 And what kind of fasting do you do?

Jessie Inchauspé 35:59 I like, will skip a meal, will skip dinner, will skip breakfast, and it just helps your body clean up its dead cells and it's really helpful. But we have to remember that fasting is a stressor. It has great benefits, but you don't have to fast in order to be healthy. It's very important to also look at what you're eating 'cause if you're fasting 16 hours a day and then you're just eating junk food, it's not gonna be helpful to your body. We have to do both in combination. Do you fast?

Steven Bartlett 36:26 Naturally.

Jessie Inchauspé 36:27 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 36:28 So, I haven't eaten today. What time are we? We're one o'clock, um, and I won't eat until-

Jessie Inchauspé 36:32 You've had a coffee?

Steven Bartlett 36:34 Mm, I've had a coffee this morning, yeah, but I won't eat until, what, 4:00 PM, 5:00 PM.

Jessie Inchauspé 36:39 Wow.

Steven Bartlett 36:39 Which will be probably, you know, after I get back to the office and stuff like that.

Jessie Inchauspé 36:42 And you feel good?

Steven Bartlett 36:43 I feel fine.

Jessie Inchauspé 36:44 So, that's the thing, right? My recommendation is if you feel great-

Steven Bartlett 36:47 Yeah.

Jessie Inchauspé 36:47 ... fab. If you feel stressed out, if you feel light-headed, if it feels hard-

Steven Bartlett 36:51 Yeah.

Jessie Inchauspé 36:51 ... then don't do it. Your body can't handle it.

Steven Bartlett 36:53 Just doesn't cross my mind to eat. I don't know how people eat in the morning.

Jessie Inchauspé 36:55 It's amazing. Yeah. Then go for it. Live your life, man. Live your life,

Jessie Inchauspé 36:59 Steven.

Steven Bartlett 36:59 What about calorie restriction? Do you think much about that?

Jessie Inchauspé 37:02 I mean, it works, right? If you eat fewer calories, you're gonna lose weight. But this is one of my favorite stories. Do you know how calories were invented?

Steven Bartlett 37:12 Uh, maybe.

Jessie Inchauspé 37:13 Okay.

Steven Bartlett 37:13 They, like, put it in a box and burnt it. They put something-

Jessie Inchauspé 37:15 Yes, I told you that. Yes.

Steven Bartlett 37:17 ... food in a box.

Jessie Inchauspé 37:17 So, back in the day, to measure calories, what do you want to measure the calorie of? Tell me something, some of the food.

Steven Bartlett 37:22 Uh, carrot cake.

Jessie Inchauspé 37:23 Okay, ca- (laughs) Okay, so if we were back in the day like a hundred years ago and wanted to measure the calories in your carrot cake, here's what we would do. We would take the carrot cake, put it in a box. Then put this box in an aquarium filled with water. So, you have the aquarium and then inside you have the box with the carrot cake. Then we would light the carrot cake on fire inside the small box and measure by how many degrees the water in the aquarium increased in temperature. So, we're just measuring the heat that is created when we burn the carrot cake. That is how we measure calories, by how much heat is generated when you burn a food. So, if you were to put in that same box, I don't know, three avocados and you burnt them, you might get the same temperature increase in the water. So, you might say, "Oh, this carrot cake and these three avocados have the same number of calories." But the thing is with the calorie thing, it's not actually telling you what's in the food. It's just measuring energy that dissipated when you burnt it. It's not telling you the carrot cake is gonna lead to a big glucose spike, gonna make you inflamed, age faster, release insulin. Whereas the three avocados will keep you steady and feeling better. So, two people can be eating 2,000 calories diet. One person can be eating in a way that keeps their glucose nice and steady. They feel good, good energy, fewer cravings, clear brain. Not super hungry all the time. The other person can be eating just glucose-spiking food and they're having a terrible time. They're hungry constantly. They have cravings, brain fog, insulin release. So, calories are interesting, but they're not everything. We need to teach people about the molecules in their food. I find that to be a much easier way to try to eat a bit less if you're trying to lose some fat, is to just focus on your glucose levels because naturally your hunger hormones will rebalance so you'll have fewer cravings, and it's much easier to eat less.

Steven Bartlett 39:14 Is there a, a story that you've been sent or a case study from someone that's followed your work that stuck with you? Someone that's understood their glucose and had a big shift in their life? I imagine there's thousands, but...

Jessie Inchauspé 39:24 Yeah, there's many, many. (breathes deeply) I think for, there's two things for me. There's the, the pregnancy stories, 'cause I think that's so touching 'cause I've had s- many friends go through difficult fertility journeys. And to hear people who were about to embark on really intense fertility treatments and just tried this and then got pregnant, I think that's really cool. And then second, I think it's the people who... There was this one guy, he've, he's had diabetes his whole life. He's, like, in his 50s, um, on lots of medication, and just thought he would lose a leg and lose his vision. That's what happens when you have type 2 for a very long time. And the thing is, his doctors had never explained to him why he had diabetes. They had just told him, you know, "Take this pill now. Take this insulin." And he read my book, and he understood why he got diabetes in the first place. And he did the hacks. He was able to reverse his type 2 diabetes in one year. All his doctors were like, "How did you do it?" You know, doctors don't often have this kind of information. And then he sent me a long message saying, "Now I'll be able to see my grandkid's wedding, and I really thank you for that." So cute. I mean-

Steven Bartlett 40:25 Mm-hmm.

Jessie Inchauspé 40:26 ... you know? We're all, we're all stuck in this vicious cycle of having this toxic food around us that's making us sick, but not understanding how to get out of it. And everybody wants to be healthy. That man, he was eating stuff that he thought would be good for him. He was eating, like, the low calorie rice cakes, and the fruit smoothies, and the low fat yogurts, and all these things, trying to be healthier. But if you don't have the right information, you can't actually make a change.

Steven Bartlett 40:55 What would you say to parents?

Jessie Inchauspé 40:57 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 40:57 It's, it's really interesting 'cause I, I've had the experience of watching a lot of early parents over the last couple of months, and, um, they care so much about their kids just eating something-

Jessie Inchauspé 41:08 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 41:08 ... that often they'll give them something that is high in glucose. Does it matter? You know, 'cause sometimes people look at kids and go, "Well, they're a kid. They'll, they'll kind of... It won't have an impact on them. They'll kinda grow out of it."

Jessie Inchauspé 41:19 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 41:20 "Well, we'll make sure that they eat healthy later. We just need to make sure they eat something now."

Jessie Inchauspé 41:24 Listen, we used to think type 2 diabetes was a disease reserved for adults, and now five-year-olds get it. It's very important to help your kids eat well so that they set up their body in a healthy way. One thing that I hear is, "Yeah, Jessie, I know I should be giving my kids eggs in the morning, but they just keep begging for the cereal and I just, I can't say no. You know, they, they won't, they won't let go. I ha- have to give it to them." And I say, "What if they were begging you for cigarettes? Would you give them the cigarettes?" Like, you don't actually have to give your kids this food. It's hard, for sure. But if it's a priority for you, you can totally do it. Absolutely. And I think it's important to set an example, actually. Because if you're having cereal and orange juice, it's gonna be really hard for your kids to take you seriously. They're like, "Come on, Dad. Like, you know, shut up." (laughs)

Steven Bartlett 42:12 What do you think of giving kids orange juice?

Jessie Inchauspé 42:14 Oh, my God. It's terrible. It's the worst. It's the, it's, it's just terrible. It's big rush of sugar. It can affect, it can affect behavior. You know, tantrums, and the sugar cravings, and the sugar lows. I mean, no, it's terrible. It breaks my heart. I'm like, "Wow, those little bodies are not happy right now."

Steven Bartlett 42:32 You know, there's so many parents that are listening right now-

Jessie Inchauspé 42:35 I know.

Steven Bartlett 42:35 ... that are like, "You don't fucking get it. You, too, childless, bah dah dah."

Jessie Inchauspé 42:39 Totally. And that's why, Steven, you know, when I have kids I totally want to write a book about that 'cause I think there's lots of stuff we can teach, uh, parents about how to feed their kids. It's too easy for me to say this stuff. I don't have kids. I don't know how it is. But I can tell you one thing, there will be no orange juice in my house. No orange juice. Like, my mom, my mom was addicted to Diet Coke when she was younger, so we never had soda in our house. Never. And I hate-I hate soda now. I would never be able to drink any of that stuff 'cause it was never, I never learned to like it. So don't be scared that your kid is gonna binge if you restrict all the sugary stuff. I think it's the opposite. I think if you don't give them the habit, they just won't have the habit.

Steven Bartlett 43:16 I do agree. We, we, um, we didn't have many sweet things or fizzy drinks or anything in, in the house and I think as a kid I was resentful because you'd, you'd go to school and you'd see those things. You'd, you'd lean towards them and you'd love them at school, but frankly, as I've grown older, I'm completely cool with just drinking water all the time.

Jessie Inchauspé 43:33 Yeah. (laughs)

Steven Bartlett 43:33 That's part- partly because that's what we had in the house.

Jessie Inchauspé 43:35 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 43:35 So my relationship with water is pretty strong.

Jessie Inchauspé 43:37 I feel you. But, you know, one thing that parents do tell me is that when they do their glucose hacks and they manage their glucose levels, they're able to be more zen around their kids and sort of, you know, stay a bit more, um, centered when their kids are freaking out or asking about something a lot. Their, their mood is steadier, so they can actually make better choices for their whole family, and they have a bit more stamina. And, uh, then their kids do the hacks and their kids get calmer and then the family is just having a better time generally. But it can really impact even a marriage. There's a great study I have to tell you about that was looking at married couples. So they recruited 300 married couples and bless these scientists, they're just insane. So they recruited 300 married couples. They gave each person in the marriage a voodoo doll representing their spouse. So if you're in a marriage, you have a voodoo doll representing your husband or your wife. Scientists then asked the people to put a pin in the voodoo doll representing their spouse every time their spouse annoyed them for six weeks. At the end of the study, they took all the voodoo dolls, counted the pins. They also measured the participants' glucose levels. (laughs) What they found, Steven, is that those who had more variable glucose levels, specifically those who had more low glucose level events, which happens after spikes, had put more pins in the voodoo doll representing their spouse. So their glucose levels seemed to be linked to how irritated they were with their partner. And then the scientists speculated that this had to do with a neurotransmitter called tyrosine. And the more glucose rollercoaster you have going on, the lower your tyrosine levels, and tyrosine balances our mood. So the food you eat can impact your marriage, can impact how you show up with others, can impact how you feel about other people's behavior. It goes really deep. It's not just about diabetes. It, it impacts who you are as a person, your personality.

Steven Bartlett 45:38 So if I stop eating sugar, it will save my marriage?

Jessie Inchauspé 45:41 I mean, you said it. (laughs)

Steven Bartlett 45:42 (laughs) It's, no, it's really interesting. I was thinking as you were talking as well about how glucose is linked to our sort of discipline-

Jessie Inchauspé 45:52 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 45:53 ... more broadly. You know, you were talking earlier about parents and them being able to be more sort of disciplined and strict with their children-

Jessie Inchauspé 45:58 Calmer, yeah.

Steven Bartlett 45:59 ... and calm when they themselves get their glucose under control. But if you think about all of our lives, our lives are shaped by the habits that we perform consistently and for us to have good, um, habits that are produ- conducive with our health, our happiness, our success-

Jessie Inchauspé 46:14 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 46:14 ... then we need to be focused and disciplined and be able to reach for the right things, um, whether it's a dumbbell or whether it's our laptop.

Jessie Inchauspé 46:21 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 46:22 So, like do, do you ever think much about the role that glucose plays with our sort of discipline to be who we want to be, to show up how we want to show up?

Jessie Inchauspé 46:28 Completely, because so many people are stuck in a cycle of being a victim to their cravings, being a victim to their fatigue, and they can't show up as the person they want to be. And if you switch your diet and use these hacks, you can actually be more connected to the version of yourself that you want to be. And even just a simple thing like a savory breakfast, it can deeply change how you show up throughout your day. Instead of being exhausted at 11:00 AM, needing four coffees, feeling lethargic in your work meeting, then at 3:00 PM thinking, "Oh, I really want to have a nap. I would have a nap on the floor right here if I could," looking for sugar all the time, you actually have a clearer brain. Like we know glucose spikes are linked to even just brain fog and brain fog is a debilitating symptom to have. You can't show up as the person you want to be. I would never be able to do the work that I do if I didn't have my glucose under control, and I learned that from the very beginning. That's why I got into this work in the first place. But 100% agree with

Jessie Inchauspé 47:24 you. Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 47:25 So the first hack we talked about was the savory breakfast.

Jessie Inchauspé 47:28 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 47:28 There was a second one, you talked about vinegar, which we sh- talked about last time, which I remember I was really repulsed by.

Jessie Inchauspé 47:32 (laughs)

Steven Bartlett 47:32 But you count this as one of your most important hacks is to-

Jessie Inchauspé 47:36 Yes.

Steven Bartlett 47:36 ... eat vinegar every day.

Jessie Inchauspé 47:37 It's drink one tablespoon of vinegar in a big glass of water before your biggest meal of the day. And the reason it's important, Steven, is because it's easy and I'm all about easy hacks, big bang for your buck. So vinegar contains acetic acid, which interacts with your digestive enzymes and cuts the glucose spike of your meal by up to 30% with no effort. So if you want a super low effort, albeit not very delicious, super low effort hack to try, do that and see how you feel with a smaller spike and a smaller crash, fewer cravings, less fatigue.

Steven Bartlett 48:10 What kind of vinegar?

Jessie Inchauspé 48:11 Any kind of vinegar. It can be the vinegar you have at home. Literally tonight just grab the white vinegar in your kitchen and not the cleaning vinegar. If it's next to the toilet paper, it's not the right vinegar. You want the kitchen vinegar, one tablespoon in a big glass of water, dilute it, drink it 10 minutes before having your dinner. See how you feel.

Steven Bartlett 48:27 What's, what role is the water playing in this?

Jessie Inchauspé 48:29 Just dilution so that it doesn't hurt your teeth 'cause your dentist won't be very happy if you take a shot of vinegar 'cause it can hurt your teeth's enamel.

Steven Bartlett 48:37 Okay, so th- that's hack number two and that's really to sort of line my stomach to, uh, uh-

Jessie Inchauspé 48:41 So no, that's to interact with your digestive enzymes.

Steven Bartlett 48:44 Okay.

Jessie Inchauspé 48:45 The lined stomach is the third hack.

Steven Bartlett 48:46 Which is?

Jessie Inchauspé 48:47 Veggie starters. So all around the world if you look at different cultures, you see this habit, this tradition of starting your meal with veggies. In Italy, antipasti, in France crudité, raw vegetables at the end of your, uh, the beginning of your meal. In the Middle East, you start your meals with herbs by the bunch, right? Why are we doing this veggies first thing?Well, recently scientists have discovered why it's so powerful. It's because veggies contain fiber. We love fiber. She's the best. When you have fiber at the beginning of a meal, what it does is that it coats your intestine. It makes this sort of protective barrier, this protective mesh, kind of gooey fibrous mesh. And so any glucose you eat afterwards will not be able to go through your intestine into your bloodstream so quickly. So, it slows down the arrival of glucose into your blood and it slows down that spike. You can make the experiment if you're wearing a monitor. Just have a small plate of, you know, carrots or spinach or broccoli or cherry tomatoes or whatever veggie you like before a meal and see how much smaller your glucose spike is. You stay fuller for longer, have fewer cravings, and you're helping your body from within too.

Steven Bartlett 49:59 And the fourth one you mentioned was moving after you've eaten.

Jessie Inchauspé 50:02 After eating, yeah. So after eating, use your m- body and your muscles for 10 minutes. You can clean your apartment, go for a walk with your dog, dance to a few songs. If you're at the office, you can do calf raises under your desk like this, so you just sort of push up onto the balls of your feet, up and down for 10 minutes. Nobody will see. And your calves contain a muscle called the soleus muscle, which is really good at soaking up glucose. But it's what we were talking about earlier, Steven. Your muscles are really effective glucose dumps, and the more you use them to contract, the more they're gonna soak up glucose from your bloodstream to use for energy. So that's the four hacks: savory breakfast, vinegar once a day, veggie starter once a day. You can also combine those two and do like a vinegar dressing on a veggie starter, and then moving after eating. And then when you wanna get pro, you go to all my other hacks.

Steven Bartlett 50:53 People talk about being in a food coma after they've eaten.

Jessie Inchauspé 50:55 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 50:56 Which is, I mean, the antithesis of what you're- you're saying, because-

Jessie Inchauspé 50:58 Absolutely.

Steven Bartlett 51:00 ... I- are you-

Jessie Inchauspé 51:00 Food coma is like a combination of brain fog and fatigue, right?

Steven Bartlett 51:03 And what's going on there?

Jessie Inchauspé 51:04 Well, I think there's a lot of things going on, but one study that's really interesting shows us that in rats, when you create lots of big glucose spikes and when you monitor the activity of their neurons in the rats, scientists noticed that the more glucose spikes they had, the slower the speed of the signal between their neurons. So- so their brain was literally slowing down. The information was going more slowly throughout the brain, and there th- they theorized that in humans this could lead to brain fog. So, you have glucose spikes linked to brain fog and your mitochondria becoming exhausted from big glucose spikes, potentially making you really tired, you know, 90 minutes after eating. With the hacks, food coma reduced significantly, so you can actually do stuff after eating instead of just being ... Lying down and not being able to get up.

Steven Bartlett 51:56 And you took these hacks and you did an experiment, right? O- on page seven of your book, The Glucose Goddess Method, you talk about this 2,700 person pilot experiment that you did in 2019?

Jessie Inchauspé 52:10 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 52:11 Which of the hacks did you use for this experiment and what did you find?

Jessie Inchauspé 52:15 So it was these four hacks. So it was a four-week experiment. Week one, you start your savory breakfast every day. You do that for the four weeks. Week two, you add in vinegar once a day. You continue for the rest of the three weeks. Week three, you add veggie starters. And week four, you add moving after eating. You don't have to change anything else about what you're eating. I'm not cutting out sugar. I'm not telling you to not drink alcohol. I'm not telling you to not drink pasta. I'm just asking you to add these four hacks in and see what happens. And-

Steven Bartlett 52:45 And these people were from 110 countries.

Jessie Inchauspé 52:47 Yeah. I recruited th- I recruited them online, um, through Instagram.

Steven Bartlett 52:50 Between the ages of 20 and 70 years old.

Jessie Inchauspé 52:53 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 52:54 And what happened?

Jessie Inchauspé 52:56 Listen, the results were really stunning. So, 90% of people reduced their cravings. 90% of people had more energy. You had really significant impacts on sleep, on hormones, on skin, on mood, on diabetes. I mean, of course this is not a, you know, placebo-controlled randomized trial. It's just an experiment. I didn't have a control group. But these numbers are pretty remarkable, and that's what I see when I meet people, when I see the testimonials from my readers. It's just very quick impact because glucose spikes impact all parts of our system, physical and mental. And when you balance them, Steven, you're creating a much better foundation for your body and your mind to be healthy.

Steven Bartlett 53:37 And these are self-reported symptoms, right?

Jessie Inchauspé 53:38 Totally, yeah. So we did-

Steven Bartlett 53:39 I'm just-

Jessie Inchauspé 53:39 ... a survey at the end of every of the four weeks and, uh, just measured the results.

Steven Bartlett 53:45 And when you say there's no control group, that means-

Jessie Inchauspé 53:47 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 53:48 ... that there wasn't another group who weren't doing-

Jessie Inchauspé 53:51 Who were doing like a different kind of-

Steven Bartlett 53:52 Like placebo.

Jessie Inchauspé 53:52 ... intervention or a placebo, no.

Steven Bartlett 53:54 Okay.

Jessie Inchauspé 53:54 So it was just 3,000 people doing the hacks and I was just asking them questions, uh, at the end.

Steven Bartlett 54:00 And it says here 40% of, roughly 40% of people who wanted to lose weight did in fact lose weight in those four weeks.

Jessie Inchauspé 54:05 Yeah. With no calorie restriction, no request to eat less. And the reason this is interesting is that even though weight loss is not the primary objective of balancing your glucose levels, what happens when you reduce your spikes is that you reduce cravings 'cause you're not activating that craving center anymore, you reduce hunger, you have more energy to potentially move more, and you lower your insulin levels. Now this is very important because when there's insulin present in your body, you cannot burn fat. Insulin is storing fat and making more fat, and when you lower insulin you can actually burn some of the fat that you stored.

Steven Bartlett 54:44 And there's gonna be people screaming 'cause they wanna know the other sort of six. There's 10, right?

Jessie Inchauspé 54:48 Yeah, I can go through all of them if you want. So-

Steven Bartlett 54:50 Yeah, if you say what the other six are, I'll just say a few of them.

Jessie Inchauspé 54:51 Of course, of course, of course. So, another hack is eating your food in the right order. Now, this is kind of similar to the veggie starter. It's just a bit more complicated and it's really where the science, it's really what the science shows us. The science shows us that if you eat a meal in the right order, meaning veggies first, then proteins and fats, then starches and sugars, instead of the opposite, you reduce the glucose spike of the meal by up to 75%.You're eating the same meal, the same quantity, the same food, just the order and using that fiber first mentality is gonna reduce your spike significantly.

Steven Bartlett 55:29 And just to be clear, this doesn't mean that I'm gonna gain less weight from that meal?

Jessie Inchauspé 55:33 (exhales) Well, no, because it doesn't ha- you know, weight loss doesn't happen within one specific meal. But it does mean you'll have fewer cravings a couple of hours after that meal, so maybe you won't reach for the donuts.

Steven Bartlett 55:44 Okay.

Jessie Inchauspé 55:44 That's how it would work. So-

Steven Bartlett 55:45 So indirectly, I might not gain more weight.

Jessie Inchauspé 55:47 Exactly. Exactly. So, eating your food in the right order. Okay? Having a savory breakfast, we talked about it. Veggies first, we talked about it. Vinegar, we talked about it. Moving after eating, we talked about it. Then there's clothes on carbs. (laughs) So that means any time you eat starches or sugars, which are the big category of carbs, make sure you're never eating them naked or on their own. Because if you eat them on their own, ploof, they just turn into glucose really, really quickly. So instead of having a slice of bread on its own, have bread and some avocado. Add some fat to that, that's a good clothing to add, or add some protein, or add some fiber. If you're having a carrot cake, don't have it on its own. Have it with a Greek yogurt, for example. So that's clothes on carbs. It's really easy to remember, especially if you're going throughout your day and you can't really pick what you're eating 'cause you don't have many options, just think, "Clothes on carbs." Then we have savory snacks. So during a day, if you wanna have a snack between meals when your stomach is empty, try to have something savory that won't increase your glucose spikes instead of having something sweet. Then another hack that we kind of touched on is if you wanna eat something sweet, have it as dessert instead of on an empty stomach. So if I want a cookie or a carrot cake, I will make sure to buy it in the morning if I know where I wanna get it from, and then have it as dessert after my lunch or after my dinner. So I'm not removing any of the sugar from your life, I'm just showing you how and when to eat it so it will reduce the glucose spike. And then we have, always eat your fruit whole. Never juiced, never dried, never smoothied, only whole, to have that protective fiber in there.

Steven Bartlett 57:30 Thinking about your Instagram, you post these photos of glucose spikes with-

Jessie Inchauspé 57:34 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 57:34 ... um, in response to different foods. How do you try all that? Is that-

Jessie Inchauspé 57:38 Oh, great question.

Steven Bartlett 57:38 ... are those your spikes?

Jessie Inchauspé 57:39 Yeah, those are my spikes, or the spikes from somebody on my team. But it's really important to note that these spikes are just illustrating studies, trials that have been done by scientists around the world. So for example, I'll find a clinical trial showing that vinegar before a meal reduces a glucose spike. It's been shown at scale with a placebo, you know, proper clinical study. And I'll just make an example with my own data to illustrate that scientific study. And that's why if you swipe on my post, you'll see my graph and then the study that I mention, or in the description of the post. I don't draw any conclusions from my own glucose data. I'm not like, "Oh, look, today I had a green tea and that didn't cause a spike, and yesterday, I had a green tea and I also had a piece of, I don't know, whatever, an almond, and that caused a bigger spike, so I should be telling everybody to not have almonds." Like, that's not how it works at all. It's just an illustration of existing studies. That's my role, that's my job, that's what I love to do, to translate studies that are existing in a way that makes it easier for people to understand, 'cause you can't just give somebody a scientific paper. You have to explain it in a visual way that they can immediately get it.

Steven Bartlett 58:47 So, of those visuals that you've made, is there some in particular that were most surprising to you, or most shocking to you? 'Cause I'm gonna put some of them on the screen. So some of them that come to mind that were maybe, had the biggest response from your audience, for example.

Jessie Inchauspé 59:03 Yeah, I think some of the ones that show traditional food combinations and how they're actually good for our glucose levels are fascinating. For example, grapes and cheese. So, I'm French, and often when you eat like a big, uh, plateau of cheese, you'll have some grapes there to have with. And it, you know, the glucose response shows us that if we had the grape on its own, it would be a bigger spike than the grape with the cheese. Not only is it really delicious, it's also better for your glucose levels 'cause you're putting clothing on that sugary carb that is the piece of fruit. Or, ham and melon, or rice and beans. All these traditional combinations cause smaller spikes than you would expect from the individual ingredients. That's really quite fascinating. In terms of the most, um, shocking ones, I think any glucose graph showing food order is really interesting. So for example, if you have salad and then pasta, which is much better for your glucose levels than having pasta and then the salad.

Steven Bartlett 1:00:01 Interesting.

Jessie Inchauspé 1:00:02 Yeah. And that's the food order hack going on.

Steven Bartlett 1:00:05 Do you know off the top of your head what your most engaged post has been of all time? The one that's been shared the most or commented on the most or...

Jessie Inchauspé 1:00:12 Um, actually, it's one currently, at least on YouTube, it's one where I explain, where I show an image of an ancestral banana, what bananas used to actually look like in nature and what bananas look like today to illustrate that the fruit that you find today in the supermarket is not natural. So that's a very, very popular one, and then I think it's the hacks, um, it's the glucose graphs and the videos where I explain food order. People really love that. It's so interesting-

Steven Bartlett 1:00:39 Mm-hmm.

Jessie Inchauspé 1:00:40 ... to see that if you have your veggies at the beginning of a meal, you have such a big impact on your glucose levels, whereas we've all been taught that all your food mixes in your stomach and makes this like big smoothie and it doesn't matter. Well, it does actually.

Steven Bartlett 1:00:54 Yeah, that, because that's really easy to change as well.

Jessie Inchauspé 1:00:57 Totally. You don't have to change what you're eating, how much you're eating. Just next time you're sat at a meal think, "Oh, I'm gonna have the veggies on my plate first." That's it. It's so powerful. These hacks are so easy, Steven, I really want everybody to know them. I wanna become irrelevant. I don't wanna have any more work 'cause everybody knows these hacks. It's so important for our (laughs) public health.

Steven Bartlett 1:01:19 I think some, uh, vinegar has arrived for you to shot.

Jessie Inchauspé 1:01:21 Yeah? No, we can't shot it, Steven. We have to-

Steven Bartlett 1:01:23 I'm gonna shot it.

Jessie Inchauspé 1:01:23 ... dilute it.

Steven Bartlett 1:01:24 I'm g- I'll dilute it as well. Let me get-

Jessie Inchauspé 1:01:26 Okay.

Steven Bartlett 1:01:26 ... let me get something

Jessie Inchauspé 1:01:26 Go for it.

Steven Bartlett 1:01:29 Yes. So, this is cider vinegar.

Jessie Inchauspé 1:01:32 But any vinegar works. You don't have to buy expensive vinegar. It doesn't have to be organic, unfiltered, whatever. Just kitchen vinegar works.

Steven Bartlett 1:01:38 Can I try it straight? I've actually never really drank it-

Jessie Inchauspé 1:01:41 Okay, but if your dentist is upset, it's not my fault.

Steven Bartlett 1:01:43 Okay. Well... So, Jessie told me to drink this straight.

Jessie Inchauspé 1:01:49 No.

Steven Bartlett 1:01:50 She's an expert. She said-

Jessie Inchauspé 1:01:51 No.

Steven Bartlett 1:01:51 ... she's a scientist. Oh, gosh.

Jessie Inchauspé 1:02:00 Yeah,

Jessie Inchauspé 1:02:01 you're not supposed to do that, Steven.

Steven Bartlett 1:02:02 No, I'm sorry.

Jessie Inchauspé 1:02:03 (laughs)

Steven Bartlett 1:02:04 No, it's been really lovely getting to- Imagine if ... But it's not that bad, but it's not-

Jessie Inchauspé 1:02:09 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 1:02:09 ... something that I would do for fun.

Jessie Inchauspé 1:02:11 Yeah. But also, if you wanna have vinegar straight, you need to get higher quality vinegar. There's some vinegars that taste really, really good, but in our case, we're just trying to get the acetic acid and we don't need high-quality expensive vinegar. We can just do, like, really cheap vinegar. And this is, uh, we just put one tablespoon. This is a good hack if you have a parent that has diabetes and they don't wanna change anything about their lifestyle. Just get them to add this before their meals when they're eating carbs and you'll see a good impact on their glucose levels. Okay, so I'm mixing it like this.

Steven Bartlett 1:02:37 You didn't put much in there.

Jessie Inchauspé 1:02:38 I put a tablespoon. It's a tablespoon.

Steven Bartlett 1:02:42 And even that small amount, you literally, it looked like you, you kind of filled the lid a little bit.

Jessie Inchauspé 1:02:46 I filled the lid twice, basically, which is approximately one tablespoon, I think. 'Cause this is probably like... Yeah. This is half a tablespoon, I would say.

Steven Bartlett 1:02:55 Okay.

Jessie Inchauspé 1:02:55 I've done this before.

Steven Bartlett 1:02:57 And-

Jessie Inchauspé 1:02:57 And now you can't taste anything.

Steven Bartlett 1:03:02 You're telling me that that will have an impact?

Jessie Inchauspé 1:03:03 Absolutely, and the studies prove it.

Steven Bartlett 1:03:05 I can't taste anything.

Jessie Inchauspé 1:03:06 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 1:03:07 Maybe because I just had the big shot of vinegar.

Jessie Inchauspé 1:03:08 Yeah, I think so.

Steven Bartlett 1:03:09 I think that's probably why. (laughs) But, but-

Jessie Inchauspé 1:03:11 Totally, Steven. I even meet people on the street, or like my readers and stuff, and they'll show me that in their purse they have a little, um, bottle of vinegar they take with them. It's super easy. And, you know, I was very skeptical, and I think everybody was super skeptical about the vinegar thing until the studies were widely read. It's, it's an amazing ingredient that's been used for millennia for its health benefits, but now we understand how it works. It has impact on visceral fat, on cholesterol levels, on glucose, and on insulin levels. It's a magical ingredient, it's super cheap, so have some vinegar. But be very careful. Now, a lot of big brands are jumping on this and are making vinegar drinks that have sugar in them. So, you want straight vinegar. You don't want anything that has even a tiny bit of apple juice or sugar. Uh uh uh. Straight vinegar.

Steven Bartlett 1:03:56 You said visceral fat.

Jessie Inchauspé 1:03:57 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 1:03:57 Is that belly fat?

Jessie Inchauspé 1:03:58 Yeah, it's the fat between your organs. It's the fat that's really bad for you. So, you can have fat that is sort of on the outside of your body and you can, you can grab it.

Steven Bartlett 1:04:07 Mm-hmm.

Jessie Inchauspé 1:04:07 You know, you can grab it and you can really pinch it.

Steven Bartlett 1:04:10 Speak for yourself.

Jessie Inchauspé 1:04:11 No, I totally have some nice-

Steven Bartlett 1:04:12 No, I do. I do have some. I do have some.

Jessie Inchauspé 1:04:12 ... fat here that I can grab. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, this fat, you know, I can grab.

Steven Bartlett 1:04:16 Yeah.

Jessie Inchauspé 1:04:16 Visceral fat is underneath-

Steven Bartlett 1:04:18 Underneath.

Jessie Inchauspé 1:04:18 ... my muscle layer. And you would know if somebody has visceral fat if they have kind of a big hard belly.

Steven Bartlett 1:04:24 Oh, okay.

Jessie Inchauspé 1:04:25 Have you ever seen that?

Steven Bartlett 1:04:25 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jessie Inchauspé 1:04:26 And they just kind of... But if you touch it, you can't make it into a roll. That's visceral fat. That's between your organs and that's really bad for you. So, vinegar helps. Of course, this is not a magic solution that's gonna fix all your issues and, you know, prevent a ton of diseases. It's a good ally to have. And I'm all about little allies you bring with you, gentle giants you have throughout your day that are gonna help you get to health in an easy, manageable way.

Steven Bartlett 1:04:49 So, rem- so if I have that glass that you've just made for me, which basically I can't taste the vinegar in because it's been diluted by water-

Jessie Inchauspé 1:04:55 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 1:04:56 And then I eat something-

Jessie Inchauspé 1:04:57 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 1:04:58 ... remind me again of the impact that that will have on my glucose spike.

Jessie Inchauspé 1:05:01 Okay. So, it'll reduce your glucose spike by up to 30% and your insulin spike also by up to 30%. The way it works is that you have these little scissors in your stomach, like invi- miniature scissors called enzymes. Their job is to chop up the starches and sugars and turn them into individual glucose molecules. It's a part of your digestive process. These enzymes do this job, do, do, do, do, do. Vinegar will temporarily inactivate some of those little scissors, essentially slowing down how quickly the glucose arrives into your bloodstream. It's all about velocity. We're all about trying to reduce the speed of arrival of glucose into your bloodstream. That's the key. So, vinegar is a really effective way of doing this.

Steven Bartlett 1:05:50 One of the things that I read online is one about glucose. And again, this is, like, conspiracy theories

Steven Bartlett 1:05:55 that I've-

Jessie Inchauspé 1:05:55 Mm.

Steven Bartlett 1:05:55 ... heard around. I read ... This is a variation of the tweet.

Jessie Inchauspé 1:05:58 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 1:05:59 Um, I'll read it out.

Jessie Inchauspé 1:06:01 Uh-huh.

Steven Bartlett 1:06:01 It says, "Sugar in a baby's brain is called ADHD. Sugar in an adult's brain is called dementia and Alzheimer's. Sugar in your eyes is called glaucoma. Sugar in your teeth is called cavities. Sugar on your skin is called aging. Sugar in your sleep is called insomnia. Sugar in your blood is called diabetes. Sugar on Wall Street is called a billion-dollar industry."

Jessie Inchauspé 1:06:25 Boom. I get the point.

Steven Bartlett 1:06:28 Yeah.

Jessie Inchauspé 1:06:28 I think sugar is definitely one of the main drivers of all these things, but there's other stuff going on, of course. But I like that. I think the Alzheimer's one is really interesting to talk about. There's a study that has followed people for 30 years and they found that people who had elevated glucose levels in their 40s were more likely to get Alzheimer's when they reached 60, 70, 80. So, having high glucose levels at midlife is a risk factor for Alzheimer's when you're older. Not only that, but scientists have started to see that some of the things you see in the brain of someone with Alzheimer's were actually similar to what you see in the body of somebody with diabetes, namely inflammation, glycation, and insulin resistance. So much so that some scientists call Alzheimer's type 3 diabetes, diabetes of the brain. Pretty freaking fascinating.

Steven Bartlett 1:07:30 There's gonna be so many people that l- are listening to our conversation when we talked about PCOS-

Jessie Inchauspé 1:07:35 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 1:07:35 ... or Alzheimer's or all these kinds of things. I think, like, how- how is it fair that I've got these conditions when I don't even eat as much sugar as most people?

Jessie Inchauspé 1:07:44 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 1:07:45 Uh, you know, they probably look at someone who is really binging out on sugar-

Jessie Inchauspé 1:07:49 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 1:07:49 ... who doesn't have any of these things. If I was a woman and I had PCOS and I ate just a little bit of sugar-

Jessie Inchauspé 1:07:56 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 1:07:56 ... I'd be like, "This is not fair." And wait, a second ago when you said at 40 if you have elevated-

Jessie Inchauspé 1:08:01 Glucose. Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 1:08:01 ... glucose levels, is that relative-

Jessie Inchauspé 1:08:04 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 1:08:04 ... to like ... Or is that to your response?

Jessie Inchauspé 1:08:08 No. They're looking at fasting glucose, so a measure of, uh, how diabetic you are essentially, if you're healthy, pre-diabetic, or diabetic. So it's not looking at the spikes. It's looking at your baseline in the morning, which is what doctors measure with a blood test.

Steven Bartlett 1:08:21 Oh, okay.

Jessie Inchauspé 1:08:21 Yeah, yeah, yeah. But Steven, life is unfair. Like I- my glucose spikes led to terrible mental health episodes of depersonalization. Lots of people I know eat so much sugar all the time, have never had one mental health issue in their life. I- I- like I don't have all the answers to that. We just know that on average if you look at everybody, by reducing those spikes, you can reduce the likelihood of these diseases. But you see people who, like, smoke two packs of cigarettes a day, drink two liters of orange juice, and live to 120 with no health issues. And you have people who are perfectly healthy who get cancer at 25 and die. Like I'm not God, I don't know. But what I do know is that in a lot of cases when you have a condition that's linked to glucose levels and you apply these hacks, you can get relief or remission. That's all I know.

Steven Bartlett 1:09:08 Are there any societies where they just don't really eat sugar that you, you can think of? Or any sort of cultures?

Jessie Inchauspé 1:09:14 I think any- any culture, any country that's been globalized and now has access to, like, fizzy drinks and stuff, it's so addictive, that stuff. As soon as you in- introduce it somewhere, everybody starts drinking it.

Steven Bartlett 1:09:24 I'd love to do a continuous glucose monitor on, like, the Hadza tribe or something-

Jessie Inchauspé 1:09:27 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 1:09:28 ... in Africa and see-

Jessie Inchauspé 1:09:28 Be amazing.

Steven Bartlett 1:09:29 ... their, like, inflammation levels and stuff.

Jessie Inchauspé 1:09:31 Yeah, I would do continuous glucose monitor, but also fasting glucose levels, right, to just kind of see what their baseline is at. Do any of them have diabetes, pre-diabetes, or not at all? What's going on? But yeah, I agree, it's

Jessie Inchauspé 1:09:42 fascinating.

Steven Bartlett 1:09:42 You mentioned a term earlier that I've only ever heard used when talking about Ozempic, GLP-1.

Jessie Inchauspé 1:09:47 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 1:09:48 What- what relationship does glucose have with GLP-1s and what the hell is a GLP-1?

Jessie Inchauspé 1:09:53 (laughs) It's so interesting. So in your digestive system, you have these little cells. They're called L cells and they're like little sensors. And they just hang out there in your digestive tract, just like chilling and doing nothing. And then as soon as you eat and they sense food, they wake up. They're like, "Alert, we have a job to do," and their job is to release a substance called GLP-1. This substance then goes to different parts of your body and tells you that you've eaten enough food and you can stop eating. So for example, you're having a big plate of pasta. The starch goes into your digestive system. The little L cells sense the pasta. They're like, "Oh, we've eaten food." And then it tells your brain, "Steven, you can stop eating. You don't have to eat another five pounds of pasta. You're satiated."

Steven Bartlett 1:10:40 Mm-hmm.

Jessie Inchauspé 1:10:40 And you become less hungry. Not only that, but GLP-1 also helps your body deal with that glucose spike. It says, "Alert, glucose is here. Let's put some of that glucose away into liver, muscle, and fat cells." So GLP-1 is a totally normal part of our physiology. It's been there forever. We all have it, but recently it's been kind of, um, just taking advantage of. So there were scientists in pharma companies who said, "Hey, this GLP-1 thing is pretty cool. What happens if we give somebody 10 times, 20 times, 100 times more GLP-1 than they naturally have? What- what's gonna happen? Let's test that." So they did that and what happened was people's glucose levels started decreasing a lot, because remember GLP-1 puts glucose away. Second impact, people stopped eating. They were not hungry anymore. They... Appetite zapped. GLP-1 is a very powerful appetite suppressant, especially when you have it in massive doses. So the pharma companies were like, "Huh, this is gonna be a helpful drug." And at first it was just for people with diabetes, okay, to reduce their glucose levels. Now it's been used for weight loss basically throughout the world. It's so popular. And you might think, "Oh, GLP-1 is so cool. It's helping people lose weight." For me, Steven, I'm like, guys, do you realize what's going on? Do you realize that we've had to invent a drug to prevent people from eating the food around them because the food around them is so toxic that it's making them sick? It's as if we found out that tap water was toxic and killing us, and instead of fixing the tap water being toxic, we invented a drug that made you less thirsty. How messed up is that, that we need this drug today to protect us from the food around us because the food around us is causing so many issues? So that's my little soapbox. But the GLP-1 drugs are really interesting because they cut people's appetite, so people lose a lot of weight. There's a few problems with those. First, up to 40% of the weight that is lost is actually muscle mass. They're not drugs that just make you lose fat. You lose cells from everywhere in your body, and muscle is really important for longevity, for health, for your glucose levels. And then when people stop taking these drugs, on average, they- they gain back 70% of the weight that they lost, and they don't gain back muscle. They gain back fat. So if you're on one of these drugs, you can actually end up in a worse situation than when you stopped taking it. So if you're on one of these, weight train three times a week, eat a lot of protein to make sure you're not losing too much muscle mass. And I see this everywhere. Some people, they just need this stuff because they're so stuck in a cycle of not having access to good food and in a cy- and a cycle of, um...... of crisis, essentially. Their body is really broken, they're really sick, and they just need a way out. But to me, it's some... It's wild that we got to this point.

Steven Bartlett 1:13:44 Are you saying that you're not a fan of people taking Ozempic or are you saying that you're not a fan of the environment that has caused the need or rise in Ozempic?

Jessie Inchauspé 1:13:52 That. I'm not a fan of the fact that we truly need this to save people's lives because the food system is so toxic and messed up that the only solution is to stop people from eating the food around them.

Steven Bartlett 1:14:03 What's the s- the solution though? Is it... Is the solution you're proposing that the government regulates food more harshly?

Jessie Inchauspé 1:14:08 Yeah, I think it's, it's regulation. It's also, you know, these big food companies, the food industry, they need to be making money, right? They need to make sure their shareholders are hap-... And the problem is most of them make toxic products that are full of sugar, but they would love to make products that are lower in sugar, but people don't like the lower-in-sugar products. We ha-... It's just like a systemic issue we have to all fix together. We either have to say, "Okay, all food companies, nobody's allowed to put more