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July 10, 2022 - January 18, 2023
The starch and sugar turned into glucose after we swallowed them; they landed in our stomach, then entered our small intestine. There, the glucose disappeared through the lining of our gut and moved into our bloodstream. From our capillaries—tiny blood vessels—it moved to larger and larger vessels, just like taking the on-ramp to a freeway.
But glucose doesn’t just stay in our blood. It seeps into every part of us, and it can be measured anywhere.
But what the ADA describes as “normal” may not actually be optimal. Early studies showed that the thriving range for fasting glucose may be between 72 and 85 mg/dL. That’s because there is more likelihood of developing health problems from 85 mg/dL and up.
The goal is to avoid spikes, whatever your fasting level is, because it’s the variability caused by spikes that is most problematic. It’s years of repeated daily spikes that slowly increase our fasting glucose level, a pattern we discover only once that level is classified as prediabetic. By then, the damage has already started.
In this book, I advise you to flatten your glucose curves, which means zooming out and seeing fewer and smaller spikes over time. Another way to describe flattening your glucose curves is reducing glycemic variability.
A glucose spike from a sweet food (cupcake) is worse for our health than a glucose spike from a starchy food (rice).
Until they do, remember that if the food you ate was sweet and it created a glucose spike, it also created an invisible fructose spike, and that’s what makes a sweet spike more harmful than a starchy spike.
When we spike, we deliver glucose to our cells too quickly.
when our mitochondria are drowning in unnecessary glucose, tiny molecules with large consequences are released: free radicals.
Free radicals are a big deal because anything they touch, they damage. They randomly snap and modify our genetic code (our DNA), creating mutations that activate harmful genes and can lead to the development of cancer. They poke holes in the membranes of our cells, turning a normally functioning cell into a malfunctioning one.
When there are too many free radicals to be neutralized, our body is said to be in a state of oxidative stress. Oxidative stress is a driver of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, cognitive decline, and general aging.
that browning happens when a glucose molecule bumps into another type of molecule. That causes a reaction. The second molecule is then said to be “glycated.” When a molecule is glycated, it’s damaged. This process is a normal and inevitable part of life, and it’s why we age, why our organs slowly deteriorate, and why we eventually die. We can’t stop this process, but we can slow it down or speed it up.
Fructose molecules glycate things 10 times as fast as glucose, generating that much more damage. Again, this is another reason why spikes from sugary foods such as cookies (which contain fructose) make us age faster than do spikes from starchy foods such as pasta (which doesn’t).
Glucose levels and glycation are so connected that a very common test to measure the level of glucose in our body actually measures glycation. The hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) test (well known among diabetics) measures how many red blood cell proteins have been glycated by glucose over the past two to three months. The higher your HbA1c level, the more often the Maillard reaction is happening inside your body, the more glucose is circulating, and the faster you are aging.
The combination of too many free radicals, oxidative stress, and glycation leads to a generalized stat...
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a diet that reduces glucose spikes decreases inflammation and along with it your risk of contracting any of these inflammation-based diseases.
It’s essential to our survival to get excess glucose out of circulation as quickly as possible, to reduce free radical formation and glycation.
One of the pancreas’s main functions is to send a hormone called insulin into the body. Insulin’s sole purpose is to stash excess glucose in storage units throughout the body, to keep it out of circulation and protect us from damage.
Our liver turns glucose into a new form, called glycogen.
Glycogen is actually the cousin of starch—it’s composed of many glucose molecules attached hand to hand. If excess glucose stayed in its original form, it would cause oxidative stress and glycation. Once transformed, it does no damage.
The liver can hold about 100 grams of glucose ...
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The second storage unit is our muscles. Our muscles are effective storage units because we have so many of them. The muscles of a typical 150-pound adult can hold about 400 grams of glucose as glycogen,
The liver and muscles are efficient, but we tend to eat much more glucose than we need, so those storage units get full rather quickly.
Once insulin has stored all the glucose it can in our liver and muscles, any glucose beyond that is turned into fat and stored in our fat reserves. And that’s one of the ways we put on weight.
The only thing that fructose can be stored as is fat.
Humans store extra glucose as glycogen and fat. Extra fructose just turns into fat.
The fat our body creates from fructose has a few unfortunate destinies: first, it accumulates in the liver and drives the development of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease. Second, it fills up fat cells in our hips, thighs, and face and between our organs, and we gain weight. Finally, it e...
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The absence of fructose means that fewer molecules end up as fat.
Ironically, processed foods that are “fat free” often contain a lot of sucrose, so the fructose in it is turned into fat after we digest it.
your body uses its fat reserves to provide storage space for the excess glucose and fructose floating around in your bloodstream. We shouldn’t be mad at our body for putting on fat; instead, we should thank it for trying to protect us from oxidative stress, glycation, and inflammation.
our body can call on glycogen in our liver and muscles to turn back into glucose whenever the thousands of mitochondria in each cell need it. Then, when our glycogen reserves begin to diminish, our body draws on the fat in our fat reserves for energy—we’re in fat-burning mode—and we lose weight.
this happens only when our insulin levels are low. If there is insulin present, our body is prevented from burning fat: insulin makes the route to our fat cells a one-way street: things can go in, but nothing can come out.
I’ve learned that there is a wide array of unwelcome short-term symptoms associated with spikes and dips, and they vary from person to person. For some, they’re dizziness, nausea, heart palpitations, sweats, food cravings, and stress; for others, like me, they’re exhaustion and brain fog. And for many Glucose Goddess community members, a glucose spike can also bring on poor mood or anxiety.
constant hunger is a symptom of high insulin levels. When there is a lot of insulin in our body, built up over years of glucose spikes, our hormones get mixed up. Leptin, the hormone that tells us we are full and should stop eating, has its signal blocked, while ghrelin, the hormone that tells us we are hungry, takes over. Even though we have fat reserves, with lots of energy available, our body tells us we need more—so we eat.
When the subjects’ glucose levels were stable, they didn’t rate many of the foods highly. However, when their glucose levels were decreasing, two things happened. First, the craving center of their brain lit up when pictures of high-calorie foods were shown. Second, the participants rated those foods much higher on the “I want to eat it” scale than when their glucose levels were stable.
A decrease in glucose levels—even a small decrease of 20 mg/dL, which is less than the 30 mg/dL dip that occurs after we spike—makes us crave high-calorie foods.
Flattening our glucose curve leads to fewer cravings.
mitochondria: too much glucose makes them quit, energy production is compromised, and we are tired.
If you have hurt mitochondria, picking your kid up is more challenging, carrying groceries is exhausting, and you won’t be able to handle stress (such as a layoff or a breakup) as well as you used to. Difficult events, whether physical or mental, require mitochondria-generated energy to overcome.
When we eat something that tastes sweet, we may think that we are helping our body get energized, but it’s just an impression caused by the dopamine rush in our brain
A common symptom of dysregulated glucose is waking up suddenly in the middle of the night with a pounding heart. Often, it’s the result of a glucose crash in the middle of the night.
insulin levels increase during pregnancy. That’s because insulin is responsible for encouraging growth—growth of the baby and growth of the mom’s breast tissue so she can prepare to breastfeed.
by flattening their glucose curves, mothers can reduce their likelihood of needing medication, reduce the birth weight of their baby (which is good because it makes birth easier and is healthier for the baby), and reduce the likelihood of a C-section, as well as limit their own weight gain during pregnancy.
Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune condition in which people lose the ability to make insulin—the cells in their pancreas that control its production don’t work.
Every time someone with type 1 diabetes experiences a glucose spike, their body cannot stash excess glucose in those three storage containers because there’s no insulin to help.
Glycation, free radicals, and the subsequent inflammation are responsible for the slow degradation of our cells—what we call aging. Free radicals also damage collagen, the protein found in
many of our tissues, which causes sagging skin and wrinkles and can lead to inflammation in joints, rheumatoid arthritis, degradation of cartilage, and osteoarthritis: our bones get brittle, our joints are in pain, and we definitely can’t go for a run in the park. If there are too many free radicals and too much damage inside a cell, that cell can decide to undergo cell death to prevent further issues. But this isn’t without consequences. When cells die, parts of us disappear: our bones waste away, our immune system weakens, our heart pumps less well, and neurodegenerative diseases such as
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when there is excess glucose in our body, our brain is vulnerable to the consequences. The neurons in our brain feel oxidative stress just as any other cells do: repeated glucose spikes, because they increase oxidative stress, lead to neuroinflammation and eventually cognitive dysfunction. On top of that, chronic inflammation is a key factor in almost all chronic degenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s.
research documents that cancer may begin with DNA mutations produced by free radicals. Second, inflammation promotes cancer’s proliferation. Finally, when there is more insulin present, cancer spreads even faster.
It’s in our gut that our food is processed, broken down into molecules absorbed into our blood or sent out to the garbage disposal. So it’s no surprise that bowel distress—such as leaky gut, irritable bowel syndrome, and slowed intestinal transit—is linked to diet.
