Glucose Revolution: The Life-Changing Power of Balancing Your Blood Sugar

by Jessie Inchauspé

“The animal tends to eat with his stomach, and the man with his brain,”

Our misled food choices influence our physical and mental well-being—and

have proven that although what we eat matters, how we eat it—in which order, combination, and grouping—matters, too.

Glucose is our body’s main source of energy. We get most of it from the food we eat, and it’s then carried in our bloodstream to our cells. Its concentration can fluctuate greatly throughout the day, and sharp increases in concentration—I

I call them glucose spikes—affect everything from our mood, our sleep, our weight, and our skin to the health of our immune system, our risk for heart disease, and our chance of conception.

glucose actually affects each and eve...

When our glucose levels are dysregulated, we experience glucose spikes. During a spike, glucose floods into our body quickly, increasing its concentration in our bloodstream

With flatter glucose curves, we reduce the amount of insulin—a hormone released in response to glucose—in our body, and this is beneficial, as too much insulin is one of the main drivers of insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes, and PCOS.

fructose is found alongside glucose in sugary foods—which is also beneficial, as too much fructose increases the likelihood of obesity, heart disease, and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease.

depersonalization-derealization disorder, a mental disorder where people can’t connect to themselves or the reality around them.

It became abundantly clear to me that it’s hard to know what is going on inside our bodies. Even when we can give voice to our emotions—gratitude, pain, relief, sadness, and more—we must then find out why. Where do we start when we don’t feel okay?

Looking at your DNA can only give you a sense of what might happen.

For most chronic conditions, from migraines to heart disease, the cause ends up being much more attributable to “lifestyle factors” than to genetics. In short, your genes don’t determine how you feel when you wake up in the morning.

Things got even more interesting as I linked my mental states to my glucose levels. My brain fog (which I had started experiencing since my accident) often correlated with a big spike, sleepiness with a big dip. Cravings correlated with a glucose roller coaster–spikes and dips in quick succession.

When I woke up feeling groggy, my glucose levels had been high throughout the night.

I zoomed into four-hour windows. For instance, “5:56 p.m.—glass of orange juice”. I looked at my glucose measurements starting one hour before I drank the juice and ending three hours later. Those gave me a convenient view of where my glucose levels were before I drank it, during, and after.

can be challenging to know how to get there. We’re overwhelmed by all the buttons. What to do? Where to start? We should start with glucose. Why? Because it’s the lever in the cockpit with the biggest bang for its buck. It’s the easiest to learn about (thanks to continuous glucose monitors), it affects how we feel instantaneously (because it influences our hunger and mood), and many things fall into place once we get it under control.

If our glucose levels are out of balance, dials flash and alarms go off. We put on weight, our hormones get out of whack, we feel tired, we crave sugar, our skin breaks out, our hearts suffer. We inch closer and closer to type 2 diabetes.

only 12 percent of Americans are metabolically healthy, which means that only 12 percent of Americans have a perfectly functioning body—including healthy glucose levels.

The more I’ve learned, the more I’ve realized that there is no benefit to extreme diets—especially

we should be looking for sustainable lifestyles, not diets, and there is space on all our plates for a little bit of everything—including sugar.

First, glucose isn’t everything.

Glucose isn’t everything. There are other factors that determine our health: sleep, stress, exercise, emotional connection, medical care, and more. Beyond glucose, we should pay attention to fat, to fructose, and to insulin, too.

we also flatten our fructose and insulin curves. This is because fructose exists only hand in hand with glucose in foods and because insulin is released by our pancreas in response to glucose.

Second, context is key.

You cannot look at a single food’s glucose curve and determine whether it is “good” or “bad.” You must compare it to its alternative.

Finally, the recommendations here are always based on evidence.

Among the things plants can make from glucose is starch.

storing glucose isn’t easy. Glucose’s natural tendency is to dissolve into everything around it,

Similarly, plants have a solution to round up glucose. They enlist tiny helpers called enzymes—teacher’s aides, if you will—that grab glucose molecules by the hand and attach them to each other: left hand with right hand, left hand with right hand, hundreds and thousands of times over. The result is a long chain of glucose,

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Whenever plants need glucose, they use an enzyme called alpha-amylase that heads to the roots and frees some glucose molecules from their starch chains. Snap—glucose is let loose, ready to be used as energy or as a building block.

Instead of attaching glucose molecules hand to hand to make starch, this enzyme connects glucose molecules hand to foot, and the resulting chain is called fiber.

Plants concentrate fructose into fruit—apples, cherries, kiwis, and more—that they dangle from their branches.

The result is a molecule called sucrose. Sucrose exists to help plants compress energy even further (a sucrose molecule is slightly smaller than a glucose and fructose molecule side by side, which allows plants to store more energy in a tighter space). For plants, sucrose is an ingenious temporary storage solution, but for us, it has a huge significance. We use it every day, under a different name: table sugar.

Each of our cells uses glucose for energy according to its specific function. Your heart cells use it to contract, your brain cells to fire neurons, your ear cells to hear, your eye cells to see, your stomach cells to digest, your skin cells to repair cuts, your red blood cells to bring oxygen to your feet so you can dance all night long.

wheat kernels, as you know, are filled with starch.

Starch is turned into glucose extremely quickly in our body.

there is no enzyme that can snap the bonds of fiber. It doesn’t get turned back into glucose. This is why when we eat fiber, it remains fiber.

fiber is an essential part of our diet and plays a very important role in aiding digestion, maintaining healthy bowel movements, keeping our microbiome healthy, and more.

Carbohydrates = Starch and Fiber and Sugars (glucose, fructose, sucrose)

glucose, fructose, and sucrose. This subgroup is called sugars.

You might hear something such as “Broccoli has few carbs but a lot of fiber.” According to the scientific nomenclature, the correct thing to say would be “Broccoli contains a lot of carbs, most of which are fiber.”

but we can make glucose from the food we eat—from fat or protein. Our liver, through a process called gluconeogenesis, performs this process.

when glucose is limited, many cells in our body can, when needed, switch to using fat for fuel instead. This is called metabolic flexibility. (The only cells that always rely on glucose are red blood cells.)

carbohydrates aren’t biologically necessary (we don’t need to eat sugar to live), but they are a quick source of energy and a delicious part of our diet, and they have been consumed for millions of years.

Nature intended us to consume glucose in a specific way: in plants.

fiber helped to slow our body’s absorption of glucose.

Today, however, the vast majority of supermarket shelves are packed with products that contain mostly starch and sugar. From white bread to ice cream, candy, fruit juices, and sweetened yogurts, fiber is nowhere to be seen. And this is on purpose: fiber is often removed in the creation of processed foods, becaus...

You may wonder: Why do we like sweetness so much? It’s because in Stone Age times the taste of sweetness signaled foods that were both safe (there are no foods that are both sweet and poisonous) and packed with energy. In a time when food wasn’t easy to find, it was an advantage to eat all the fruit before anyone else could, so we evolved to feel pleasure when we tasted something sweet. When we do, a hit of a chemical called dopamine floods our brain.

regardless of which plant is used, the resulting sucrose added to processed foods is the chemical copy of the one found in fruit. What’s different is its concentration.