Moment 124: 10 Sugar Hacks So You Can Eat Whatever You Want! Jessie Inchauspé
Guests: Jessie Inchauspé
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If this glucose rollercoaster is bad for me—the spikes and the crashes—how does one flatten the glucose curve? In your book, you talk about these ten hacks. Can we go through some of these hacks?
For sure. I think that's the most important thing, really. Hack one: Eat food in the right order. To give some context, all the hacks in my books are just summaries of scientific studies.
When I was going really deep into all the science, I found all these symptoms and conditions linked to spikes. I also found these amazing ways we could still eat everything we loved, but without creating these spikes. You can still eat everything you love, but reduce any symptoms or problems you might be having physically or mentally.
So, eat your food in the right order. Next time you're faced with a meal, listeners, there is something amazing that you should know. If you eat the ingredients in the meal in a specific order, you can reduce the glucose spike of that meal by up to 75% without changing how much you're eating or what you're eating.
Just the order has a massive impact on your glucose. You can still eat the same meal but with way fewer spikes and way fewer consequences. The right order is: veggies first, proteins and fats second, and starches and sugars last. Let's take an example of a meal. Steven, what's a typical meal you have?
Cookies.
Okay, so let's say cookies; that's your sugars. Let's say you're having cookies. Do you eat fish?
Yes, I eat everything, to be honest. Other than snails— I still have a little bit of a psychological issue there.
I've never tried snails, and I'm French! It just grosses me out. So, let's say you have some fish, some broccoli, some pasta, some olive oil and avocado, and a cookie. The right order for your glucose levels is going to be the broccoli first, then the fish, then the pasta and the cookie. The avocado and olive oil you can have with the fish.
Now, this is an interesting theoretical thing to understand. It might not always be very practical to separate out your meal, but there are a few things you should know. Number one, you don't actually have to wait between any of these foods. You can just eat them one after the other and still get the amazing impact on your glucose levels.
And number two, really the most important thing here that we need to learn from this scientific study is that the veggies should come first. What I do now, and what my community does, is that we always have a veggie starter at the beginning of a meal and then we just eat the rest of the meal normally. That already has a massive impact on your glucose levels and how you're going to feel.
A lot of people, when they eat, do it very much in the opposite order. They leave the veggies on the side of the plate. When I was a kid, I'd go for whatever was tastiest first, and then the green stuff was a requirement. Often parents will say, "Eat the greens before you get your dessert."
That's interesting, although in restaurants, obviously dessert comes last, which is probably good.
And in restaurants also, bread usually comes first. Let me explain why it's so important to avoid having the bread first. Bread is a starch. As I explained, there are starches and sugars, and those are the two things that turn into glucose when we digest them.
When we eat something that contains glucose on an empty stomach—when we eat it first, like a piece of bread—the starch breaks down into glucose molecules in your stomach and then makes its way super quickly into your intestine and your bloodstream because there's nothing stopping it. It goes straight from your mouth to your bloodstream, very quickly increasing the concentration and causing a spike.
Now, if you start your meal with veggies instead, this is what happens. Veggies contain another superwoman: fiber. Have you heard of fiber before?
I love fiber.
Veggies contain fiber. Fiber, when we eat it at the beginning of a meal, does something absolutely amazing. When she arrives first in your stomach and digestive tract, she makes her way from your stomach to your upper intestine.
There, she deploys herself onto the walls of your intestine like a cool, viscous, protective mesh and just stays there, protecting you. That viscous mesh that fiber has created is then going to reduce the spike of your meal.
All the glucose molecules arriving later on from the pasta, for example, are not going to be able to make their way as quickly and as much through your intestine into your bloodstream. Because of the fiber shield, the glucose molecules are going to take way longer to make their way into your bloodstream. As a result, you get a smaller spike, but you still ate the same food.
So, when I go to a restaurant, some give you bread, others like Japanese ones give you edamame.
That's much better. That's a veggie. Any type of veggie is going to be really helpful. I try to make it up about 30% of my meal. It can be anything; they can be raw, they can be cooked. In my new book, I have 35 amazing veggie starter recipes. You can dress them, you can put olive oil, vinegar, lemon, cheese, whatever onto it to make that veggie starter feel really delicious because it's going to protect you so much.
If you're somebody who suffers from cravings in the afternoon or unsteady energy, I think this hack is a really powerful one to try out.
I'm a speed eater, I'm going to be honest. I tend to eat my meals super quick. The excuse I tell myself is that because I'm busy, I just inhale it. When I eat something with my girlfriend, she literally blesses the food with her hands first and then she takes her time. I'm treating it like it's a competition.
She's often said to me, "Just slow down." One of the points that someone raised to me at some point about my super-fast eating habits was that it is bad for me. I'm wondering if the speed in which we eat has an impact on our glucose spikes as well. If I ate slower, could I flatten the curve?
Absolutely, baby, yes. She's right. Well yes, then again, I'm a very strong proponent of picking your battles. Yes, we could all do better in so many different ways, but also, you're a speed eater; that's fine.
If you want to slow down aging and do all that, you can do two things. You can either just eat as quickly as you want but add a veggie starter at the beginning of your meal. That already is going to have a very powerful impact on your glucose. I would argue it probably will have a stronger impact than just eating the same meal more slowly, because you're not going to eat the meal over two hours; you might go from three minutes to eight minutes. It's not that big of a difference. The veggie starter will have a much bigger impact.
Do you remember hack number three from your book?
Stop counting calories? That's a ghostwriter check; I can confirm you wrote your book. I had so much fun writing the book. So, what do you know about calories?
Very little. But what I think they are— it's like a thermonuclear reaction where a calorie is the measure of how much heat is required to break down a molecule of food.
That's really not bad! You really should give yourself more credit. Before we started, you were like, "I know nothing about food and biochemistry." Actually, you know some pretty good stuff.
Fantastic. So, I think a lot of people will also say calories are bad, or I need to eat not too many calories, otherwise bad stuff happens and I gain weight. I want you to know how calories were actually invented and measured, because it is completely mind-boggling.
The way that scientists first started measuring the calories in a food is the following. Let's use our imagination here. The scientist took a box, and they put a food in that box—let's say that cookie. They put the cookie in a box. Then, they put this box with the cookie in it in another box that contains water. They submerged the cookie box in water.
And then, somehow, they light the cookie inside the small box on fire. They burn the cookie and they measure by how many degrees the surrounding water increases in temperature. That is how we measured calories: literally measuring how much heat happens when we burn that food.
As a result, you might test a cookie in this setting and you might test it against an avocado. You might see that the temperature in that big box increases by as many degrees for both the cookie and the avocado. So, from a calorie perspective, you'd say these two foods contain the same number of calories.
But that's a really reductive way of thinking about food. It's almost like thinking these two books are both 500 pages, therefore they're the same. You see how that's a problem? The number of pages in a book doesn't tell us anything about what the book is about, who wrote it, what are the words, what's the message. No clue.
The calories in a food also give us no information about what's actually in the food. How is that food going to impact how I feel, my physical health, my mental health, my glucose levels?
So, I want to teach people about the molecules in the food. So they actually start recognizing, "Oh, that food is going to make a spike, that food is not." Hack number three is called "Stop Counting Calories" because essentially, what I found is that if people just focus on balancing their glucose levels and using the hacks to do that—and just completely stop counting calories—their health improves significantly.
And it's a much nicer world to live in than a world of calorie counting. Something else you should know: two people can be eating the exact same number of calories—let's say 2,000 calories a day. But if one person is eating in a way that causes all these spikes and the other one isn't, the "spiky" 2,000-calorie person is going to be full of cravings, exhausted, inflamed, aging faster, not sleeping as well, could have mental health issues, could have PCOS, and could be gaining weight.
It's not the same thing. The calories are not really what matters. We need to learn about how the food is actually affecting us.
I find that so interesting because a lot of the reason why people do count calories is for weight loss or weight gain reasons. But because of the glucose spikes in one set of 2,000 calories, it'll have a significant impact on the insulin levels.
Yes, and also on how you're feeling and how difficult that fat loss is or not, and how much of a good time you're having along the way. That's the nuance that's really missing.
Of course, if you go from 2,000 calories to fewer than that, you're essentially reducing how much you're eating. So yes, it's possible that'll lead to weight loss, but one: that's not really sustainable. Do you really want to count calories for the rest of your life? That feels really difficult to me.
And second, it doesn't tell us again what you're eating. So you're reducing quantity, but it might not be improving your health at all. You might be losing weight on your body but actually increasing the problems and the symptoms and the conditions. I really hope people stop counting calories and just kind of learn how to approach the food landscape and food habits in a way that heals them from everything they want to heal from.
Breakfast! What did you have for breakfast, Steven?
Today, nothing yet. I was going to— so, I ordered food to this studio at 10:30 AM and it said it would take half an hour to get here. It got here when you arrived. I looked at it and I thought, if I eat this, then I'm going to have some kind of dump halfway through this conversation. So it's just sat through there.
Can I ask what you ordered? Because some breakfast foods will have that impact and make you feel tired.
I ordered a breakfast wrap. It's got like eggs, avocados, bacon in it, and it's like a gluten-free wrap thing. I was looking at it thinking because of this bread, it's probably going to make me have a dump, and I don't ever want to have an energy dump halfway through a conversation. I don't want to fall asleep; that's rude. So I've not eaten yet, I just had coffee.
Actually, your choice is a pretty good one in terms of glucose. The main thing we want to do to steady our glucose levels is have a savory breakfast instead of a sweet one. We want to have a breakfast that contains protein—like eggs, fish, meat, protein powder—maybe some fat like the avocado (that's fantastic), and maybe some fiber if you want to add some veggies in there.
Any sort of bread or starches or potatoes should be there just for taste; it should not be the centerpiece of the breakfast. And then, importantly, for a savory breakfast that keeps your glucose levels steady, we shouldn't eat anything sweet at all for breakfast, except whole fruit if we want some.
What's the difference between whole fruit and whatever isn't whole fruit?
Well, fruit has been bred by humans for a super long time to be extra sweet and extra juicy. Today, when you look at an apple, for example, it's really been pumped full of sweetness and sugar and made really easy to eat.
I had this conversation this week with my partner. She was offering me some fruit, and because now I'm like a food arrogant little food guy because of all these conversations I've had, I was like, "Babe, it's got sugar in it and they've bred it." We had a conversation about it and I Googled it—I Googled the historic banana, and apple, and the pear. I showed her, and she was like, "What?"
Because obviously the fruit we have today is so bright and big and easy to eat. And then I showed her some of these pictures of these old bananas and they're tiny and they're full of seeds and stuff.
Tiny and actually quite tart. You wouldn't really eat that many of them. Even though fruit has been bred for a super long time to be extra sweet, if you want to eat something sweet, it's still the best thing to eat because of the fiber that fruit contains. Fiber is protective in whole fruit.
Now here's the thing. The problem starts when we denature that piece of whole fruit—when we blend it, when we juice it, when we dry it, when we puree it. Let's take, for example, when you juice a piece of fruit. Juicing is essentially taking away all the fiber and getting rid of it.
If you juice an apple, you're just taking all the sugar from the apple, putting it in water, and getting rid of all the protective fiber. All of that super-concentrated sugar that's been bred into that piece of fruit, you're now giving to your body in a really fast way. The speed of delivery is really important.
The faster all that sugar arrives, the more your mitochondria get hurt, the more the spikes are happening, inflammation, etc. When you drink apple juice, you're essentially drinking the amount of sugar in two already pretty bred apples and drinking it in a few seconds. Your body is experiencing a massive spike.
Your body doesn't care whether the sugar came from a piece of fruit or if it came from cane sugar and is in a can of Coca-Cola. The molecules in the apple juice and in the can of Coke are the same. Your body does not make a difference.
In a can of fruit juice, there's almost as much sugar as in a can of Coca-Cola. When we eat fruit juice, we have to do it in a way that's like, "Okay, this is dessert." This is for my pleasure; this is not for my health. This is going to give me pleasure and maybe make me feel a bit happier, but it's not going to help my body.
Which one of these bastards told me that fruit juice was good for me? I've been drinking this stuff like I was growing up. If I went and had fruit juice, I was like, "Well done, Steve. You've done future Steve a massive service there." And then I got to 30 years old and people start telling me that fruit juice is bad for me. Who lied to me?
The people who make fruit juice! And same for me. I grew up drinking orange juice and a Nutella crepe every morning for breakfast. I was like, "Oh, I'm having orange juice, so it balances it out." I had no idea that I was just eating starches and sugars, just eating a massive glucose spike for breakfast.
When you create a big glucose spike at breakfast, your entire day then becomes completely like a glucose rollercoaster. The breakfast spike really dictates how you're going to be doing for the rest of the day.
So, what is a "whole fruit"?
A piece of fruit that is just like whole—something you can hold in your hand that you buy at the supermarket, untouched from the tree.
I'm not going to have any more— so granola. I used to think granola was— again, doing my health a service by eating granola.
Listen, if you're having a great time—no symptoms, feeling amazing, top energy, no cravings, no hormonal issues, no skin issues—I have nothing to teach you. But if you're suffering in one way or another, look at your breakfast and avoid the sweet stuff. Avoid the granolas, the breakfast cereals, the oats with banana and honey in them.
Switch to something savory. That is really going to help set your day on a much better path and going to help your physical and mental health thrive.
You have these ten hacks in your book. There was one in particular where I was like, "I can do this," and then there was this other one. Which one do you think it is?
The vinegar one? Is that the one? You're such a weirdo. How did you— why did you ask me to drink vinegar before I eat? Can you imagine me going to a restaurant like, "Hi, could I just get a glass of vinegar, please, before I eat?"
Well, actually, it's happening more and more, Steven. Okay, by the way, the hacks are there for people to pick and choose from. You're supposed to compose with them as you wish. You don't have to do everything all the time.
Hack seven: drink vinegar before you eat. The scientific studies show us that if we have one tablespoon of vinegar in a tall glass of water before a meal, it can reduce the glucose spike of the meal by up to 30% and the insulin spike by up to 20%.
How the heck does that work? Vinegar contains another cool molecule called acetic acid. Acetic acid does two main things that help our glucose levels. Number one, starches break down into glucose when you digest them. Acetic acid slows down that process. It slows down how quickly a piece of bread is going to break down into individual molecules.
So it slows down how quickly the molecules of glucose arrive in your bloodstream, which is again what we want. And second, acetic acid goes to your muscles and it tells your muscles to soak up glucose as it arrives into your body.
So glucose arrives more slowly in the bloodstream and muscles soak it up as it gets there. Those two actions reduce the spike of the meal without you needing to change any part of that meal. If you wanted to have that cookie and you wanted to have the cookie without setting off a glucose rollercoaster, having a vinegar drink before would be a really good idea.
I'll think about it. Moving on. Hack eight: after you eat, move. People say this; they go for walks and stuff after the Christmas meal. Why is that from a scientific perspective important?
It's interesting because it's been around culturally for a very long time. The post-meal walk, etc. Even the veggie starter—in France, we have this thing called *crudités*, which is raw veggies at the beginning of a meal. In Italy, *antipasti*. It's cool to see that a lot of these hacks have been around for a very long time, but now we understand how they work.
Moving after eating: your muscles, when they contract, they need energy to do so. The first place they look for this energy is in the glucose in your bloodstream. We can use that to our advantage. The more a muscle is contracting, the more glucose it needs.
If we use our muscles for 10 minutes after a meal, some of the glucose from that meal will make its way to your muscles instead of just standing there and creating a spike. You can use your muscles in lots of different ways. You can go for a walk, you can clean your apartment, you can play with your dog, you can go to the gym.
And you can do my new favorite thing. Let's do it together, Steven. So put your feet on the ground and do some calf raises. Do you know what that is? You just go onto your tippy-toes and back down. Calf raises. You feel your calf contracting.
This is actually a really effective way to get your muscles to soak up glucose because there's a muscle in your calf called the soleus muscle, which is really extra good at soaking up glucose. So, for example, after a meal you're at work, you're at your desk, you want to reduce the spike? Do some calf raises like this. Nobody will see and you'll be helping your glucose.
People are going to think I'm so weird. They're going to see me have this shot of vinegar and then sit here like there's something in my—
Yeah, but then they're going to be like, "Damn, Steven is doing so great. Look, he's 65 and still kayaking." Then they might think they should have done the same.
That's a good trade-off. I'm happy to take the weirdness. That's really interesting because when I think about glucose spikes and movement, my mind went straight to being sat on a plane. They bring the food down, they bring the dessert trolley down, and then you eat the cookie and then you sit there for 10 hours because you're on a plane. That sounds like a nightmare.
Well, for your glucose it's not great, but there's lots of things you can do. First, don't have the cookie on an empty stomach. Have it after some other food—for example, maybe you bought some nuts at the airport. Have some of those nuts before the cookie. That's what I call "putting clothing on your carbs." And then you can do some calf raises in a plane.
Short of vinegar?
You can do the vinegar. Don't do it as a shot; make sure you dilute it. It's better for your teeth.
Generally, do you have a system for when you travel and what you eat?
Yes. If I'm traveling, I always make sure I have a really, really good savory breakfast, even if I'm not hungry, before I leave for the plane. So I have my favorite like two-egg omelet with feta and tomatoes; that's my favorite thing to make.
What is your general— walk me through your food. I was watching some of your interviews, and the most replayed part was you describing what you ate.
No way! Wow.
It was an hour and a half long interview, and at the very, very end of it, the interviewer asked you what you ate on a daily basis. That was the highest spike in the replay time. So in an idyllic Jessie day?
Okay, my favorite two-egg omelet for breakfast. I wake up at 7:45, have breakfast at 8:15. That makes me feel pretty good and full until lunch. At lunch, I usually will have a big ass salad. Maybe some spinach, quinoa, everything mixed together. I put some vinegar dressing in there to reduce the spike, salmon, avocado, cheese—a nice big yummy thing.
Then, inevitably, in the afternoon I want to eat something sweet because I love sugar. That's the thing you have to understand: I love sweet foods. That's one of the reasons that I figured out all these hacks. I want to reduce my spikes because I want my mental health to improve, but I don't want to give up my chocolate cake. That's just not happening.
So anyway, inevitably in the afternoon, I'm like, "Mmm, time for some sweet foods." So I'll do lots of hacks around that. I'll do the vinegar hack before the chocolate cake. I'll also do another hack we haven't spoken about yet called "putting clothing on your carbs."
That means when you're eating starches and sugars, add some protein, fat, or fiber to them. For example, I'll have the chocolate cake with some Greek yogurt, which is actually a freaking delicious combo as well. So I'll do that and then I'll go for a walk or I'll go to the gym, I'll use my muscles.
So I'm getting all the pleasure from the cake with less of an impact. And then in the evening is usually when I have more time to have a more longer meal. So I'll do veggie starter, some nice whatever proteins and pasta afterwards. And then usually I don't really want anything sweet after dinner because I've had the sweet thing in the afternoon.
That would be my common food habit. But then today, for example, I woke up at 5:45 because I had this shoot to go to in the morning before coming here. And so I just grabbed some ham from my fridge and I just started munching on some ham in the morning because again, a protein-centric breakfast is really key to making sure you have lots of energy all day. I wanted to come here and have a lot of energy, so I was like, I need to be really good about my savory breakfast today. So I just had that.
So going back then to my breakfast today. Ahead of doing this podcast, what should I be eating in your view to stay high energy, to stay focused, etc.?
You should definitely avoid granola. Anything sweet. You want to think about protein at breakfast. So actually, your breakfast wrap was pretty good, I would say, because it has eggs, it has avocado, it has some fats, some protein. That's pretty, pretty good. As long as the wrap is not like a huge amount of bread, you're fine because it's fine to have bread or starches in the morning for taste.
To me, that would feel like a really good option. And if you do get tired after eating something like that, maybe you're having a bit too much food; that can also be a thing. So maybe have half and you should feel pretty good.
And then, you know, a lot of people are sad to give up their sweet breakfast foods. Here's another hack you can use: you can still have that sugar, but have it as dessert after lunch or after dinner instead of in the morning on an empty stomach. It's not about cutting anything out; it's about learning to place the foods and organize them in a way that keeps your glucose levels steady.
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