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

by Jessie Inchauspé

Here’s this fact in action: in 2015, a research team out of UC San Francisco proved that we can keep eating the exact same number of calories, but if we change the molecules we eat, we can heal our body of disease. They demonstrated, for example, that calories from fructose are worse than calories from glucose (it’s because fructose, as you know from part 2, inflames our bodies, ages our cells, and turns to fat more than glucose does).

people on a glucose-flattening diet can lose more weight while eating more calories than people who eat fewer calories but spike their glucose levels.

It has to do with insulin: when we decrease our glucose levels, our insulin levels come down, too. A 2021 review analyzing 60 weight loss studies proved that insulin reduction is primordial and always precedes weight loss.

Usually, when insulin ushers glucose to the “storage lockers” after a spike, the curve is smooth and bell-shaped and glucose is brought back down steadily to its fasting level. Sometimes, however, our pancreas releases too much insulin. As a result, too much glucose is stashed away. Instead of our glucose coming back down to fasting levels, it actually crashes and goes below normal for a little bit. This is called reactive hypoglycemia. When our glucose level dips and before our body brings it back up by releasing extra glucose into the blood, we can feel side effects: hunger, cravings, shakiness, light-headedness, or tingling in our hands and feet.

Reactive hypoglycemia is a common condition, especially in people with other glucose-related issues such as PCOS. How little or how much you experience it varies widely. In people with diabetes, the swings of reactive hypoglycemia tend to be more pronounced—and their glucose level can get so low that it causes a coma. In nondiabetics, just a small dip can lead to extreme hunger, even if a meal was only two hours ago. And the greater the dip, the more hungry we become before the next meal.

When people get a reactive hypoglycemia diagnosis, they often hear that they should snack every few hours to make sure their glucose doesn’t drop too low. But this just makes the problem worse: they eat something sweet or starchy, which shoots their glucose back up, releases insulin, and makes their levels come crashing down again. Then the cycle repeats. They’re on a never-ending glucose roller coaster.

Flip the logic around: if we add more glucose or fructose to a meal, this increases the spikes, which leads to more weight gain, more inflammation, and less satiety.

The fact that all calories are not equal is something that the processed food industry does its best to obfuscate. It hides behind calorie counts because they divert our attention away from scrutinizing what’s actually in the box—such as lots of fructose, which, unlike glucose, cannot be burned by our muscles for fuel and is almost all converted postdigestion into fat.

we have proof that cereal for breakfast is definitely, unequivocally not a good way to start the day.

Cereal is made of either refined corn or refined wheat kernels, superheated, then rolled flat or puffed into various shapes. It’s pure starch, with no fiber left. And because starch is not the most palatable thing on its own, table sugar (sucrose, made of glucose and fructose) is added to the concoction. Vitamins and minerals join the mix, but the benefit of these doesn’t outweigh any of the harm of the other components.

Insulin wants to protect us from the onslaught of glucose, so it removes it from circulation. So instead of the newly digested molecules staying around in our system to be used for fuel, they are stored away—as glycogen or fat.

Scientific experiments confirm this: if you compare two diets, the one with more carbohydrates leads to less available circulating energy postdigestion. More carbs for breakfast means less available energy.

first thing in the morning, when we are in our fasted state, our bodies are the most sensitive to glucose.

All of us, regardless of our diet, should also think about our glucose levels.

To think that is to misunderstand the nature of sugar—because sugar is sugar; it’s the same whether it comes from corn or beets and has been crystallized into white powder, which is how table sugar is made, or from oranges and kept in liquid form, which is how fruit juice is made. Regardless of which plant they come from, glucose and fructose molecules have the same effect on us.

is that if we are going to eat some sugar, a whole piece of fruit is the best vehicle for it. First, in a whole piece of fruit, sugar is found in small quantities. And you’d be hard pressed to eat three apples or three bananas in one sitting—which is how much can be found in a smoothie.

in a whole piece of fruit, sugar is always accompanied by fiber. As I explained earlier, fiber significantly reduces the spike caused by any sugar we eat.

By blending a piece of fruit, we pulverise the fiber

As soon as we blend, squeeze, dry, and concentrate the sugar and remove the fiber in fruit, it hits our system fast and hard—and leads to a spike.

One bottle of orange juice (whether freshly squeezed, with or without pulp) contains 24 grams of sugar—that’s the concentrated sugar of three whole oranges, with none of the fiber. It’s the same amount of sugar as in a can of Coca-Cola. With just one bottle of orange juice, you’ve reached the limit of the number of grams of sugar you should consume in a day, according to the American Heart Association (it recommends no more than 25 grams daily for women and 36 for men).

This is surprising to most people, but on a molecular level, there is no difference between table sugar and honey. And there is no difference between table sugar and agave syrup. In fact, there is no difference between table sugar and any of these: agave syrup, brown sugar, caster sugar, coconut sugar, confectioner’s sugar, demerara sugar, evaporated cane juice, honey, muscovado sugar, maple syrup, molasses, palm sugar, palmyra tree sugar, turbinado (raw) sugar. They are all made of glucose and fructose molecules. They are just packaged differently, named differently, and priced differently.

It’s, um, natural to think that those options are better for us than table sugar. But here’s something to chew on: all sugar is natural, because it always comes from a plant. Some table sugar even comes from a vegetable (sugar beets). But that doesn’t make it any different.

The molecules are what matter: by the time they reach your small intestine, they’re all just glucose and fructose. Your body doesn’t process sugar differently whether it came from a sugar beet, an agave plant, or a mango. As soon as a fruit is denatured and processed and its fiber is extracted, it becomes sugar like any other sugar.

Though sugar is sugar, regardless of its source, what is true is that the ratio of glucose and fructose molecules is different from sugar to sugar. Some sugars contain more fructose, while others contain more glucose.

For instance, agave syrup is often recommended to diabetics and women diagnosed with gestational diabetes because it has a “lower glycemic index” than table sugar. This is true—it does spike our glucose levels less. But the reason for this is that it contains more fructose and less glucose than regular table sugar. (Agave is about 80 percent fructose, compared to table sugar, which is 50 percent fructose.) And although this means the glucose spike it causes is smaller, the fructose spike is bigger.

Now, get this: recall from part 1 that fructose is worse for us than glucose—it overwhelms our liver, turns to fat, precipitates insulin resistance, makes us gain more weight than glucose, and doesn’t make us feel as full. As a result, since agave has more fructose than...

Some artificial sweeteners spike our insulin levels, which mean they prime our body to store fat, encouraging weight gain.

preliminary studies suggest that the taste of sweeteners may increase our craving for sweet foods, just as sugar does.

The best sweeteners that have no side effects on glucose and insulin levels are:

There are some artificial sweeteners I’d recommend you avoid, because they are known to increase insulin and/or glucose levels, especially when combined with foods, or cause other health issues. They are:

remember, sweetness activates the addiction center in our brain. The more we eat it, the more we want it.

When we make foods off limits in an effort to force a lifestyle change, it doesn’t work. The hour comes when we can’t take it any longer and we empty the cookie jar.

when we’re done eating, our organs are just getting started—and they keep working for four hours on average after our last bite. This busy time is the “posteating,” or postprandial, state.

The postprandial state is the period of our day when the largest hormonal and inflammatory changes take place. To digest, sort, and store the molecules from the food we just consumed, blood rushes to our digestive system, our hormones rise like a tide, some systems can be put on hold (including your immune system), while others are activated (such as fat storage).

Insulin levels, oxidative stress, and inflammation increase.

The bigger a glucose or fructose spike after a meal, the more demanding the postprandial state is for our body to deal with because the more free radicals, glyc...

When our body is not in the postprandial state, things are a little easier. Our organs are on cleanup duty, replacing damaged cells with new ones and clearing our systems. For instance, the gurgling we feel in our small intestine when we haven’t eaten in a few hours is our empty digestive tract cleaning its walls. When our body is not in the postprandial state, our insulin levels come down and we can go back to burning fat instead of stashing it.

switch between using glucose for fuel (from our last meal) to using fat for fuel (from our fat storage). This switching ability, as mentioned earlier, is called metabolic flexibility. It is a prime measure of a healthy metabolism.

She needed to eat every 90 minutes because her cells had come to rely on glucose for fuel every few hours. When Marie changed the way she ate, she retrained her cells to use fat for fuel instead.

insight from the latest research on glucose spikes: if you want to eat something sweet, it’s better to have it as dessert rather than as a snack in the middle of the day on an empty stomach. Understanding the postprandial state is key to learning why.

When we forgo snacks, we keep our system out of the postprandial state for longer. That means there’s time for the cleanup I described above. And by eating something sweet after a meal, we lessen the corresponding glucose spike it would cause because—shout-out

How do I know if I’m metabolically flexible? If you can easily go five hours between meals without feeling light-headed, shaky, or hangry, you’re likely to be metabolically flexible.

drink consisting of a tablespoon of vinegar in a tall glass of water, drunk a few minutes before eating something sweet, flattens the ensuing glucose and insulin spikes.

Here’s what happened in all these participants’ bodies: when they drank vinegar before eating a meal rich in carbohydrates, the glucose spike from that meal was reduced by 8 to 30 percent. To understand how this happens, we have an important clue: the amount of insulin also decreases when vinegar is consumed before eating (by about 20 percent in one study). This tells us that drinking vinegar does not flatten glucose curves by increasing the amount of insulin in the body. And this is a very good thing. Indeed, you could flatten a glucose curve by injecting someone with insulin or giving them a medication or a drink that would release more insulin into their system. This is because the more insulin there is in the body, the more your liver, muscles, and fat cells work to remove any excess glucose from the bloodstream and quickly store it away. However, although insulin brings glucose levels down, it also increases inflammation and weight gain. What we really want to do is flatten our glucose curves without increasing the amount of insulin in the body. Which is what vinegar does. So how does it work? Scientists believe that several things could be at play.

Scientists have found that the acetic acid in vinegar temporarily inactivates alpha-amylase. As a result, sugar and starch are transformed into glucose more slowly, and the glucose hits our system more softly.

Second, once acetic acid gets into the bloodstream, it penetrates our muscles: there, it encourages our muscles to make glycogen faster than they usually would, which in turn leads to more efficient uptake of glucose.

These two factors—glucose being released into the body more slowly and our muscles uptaking it more quickly—mean that there is less free-flowing glucose present, so less of a glucose spike.

It does so in two ways: it slows the arrival of glucose into the bloodstream, then increases the speed at which our muscles soak it up and turn it into glycogen.

As soon as the influx of glucose (from a large bowl of rice, for example) hits our body, two things can happen. If we stay sedentary as the spike reaches its peak, glucose floods our cells and overwhelms our mitochondria. Free radicals are produced, inflammation increases, and excess glucose is stored away in the liver, muscles, and fat. If, on the other hand, we contract our muscles as the glucose moves from our intestine to our bloodstream, our mitochondria have a higher burning capacity. They aren’t overwhelmed as quickly—they are thrilled to use the extra glucose to make ATP to fuel our working muscles. On a continuous glucose monitor graph, the difference is stark.

While usually our muscles need insulin to stash glucose away, if our muscles are currently contracting, they don’t need insulin to be able to uptake glucose.