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

by Jessie Inchauspé

In 1912, a French chemist by the name of Louis-Camille Maillard described and gave his name to this phenomenon, now known as the Maillard reaction. He discovered 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. When we toast bread, we make it brown. Our insides are browning just like this. The more glucose we deliver to our body, the more often glycation happens. Once a molecule is glycated, it’s damaged forever—which is why you can’t untoast a piece of toast. The long-term consequences of glycated molecules range from wrinkles and cataracts to heart disease and Alzheimer’s disease. Since browning is aging and aging is browning, slowing down the browning reaction in your body leads to a longer life. 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).