Glucose Revolution: The life-changing power of balancing your blood sugar

by Jessie Inchauspé

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. Without insulin, we would die; people without the ability to make it – those with type 1 diabetes – must inject insulin to make up for what the pancreas can’t produce.

Enter storage unit number one: the liver. The liver is a very convenient storage unit, because all of the blood that comes from the gut carrying new glucose from digestion has to go through the liver.

Our liver turns glucose into a new form, called glycogen. It’s equivalent to how plants turn glucose into starch. Glycogen is actually the cousin of starch – it’s composed of many glucose molecules attached hand to hand.

The liver can hold about 100 grams of glucose in glycogen form

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 adult weighing around 68 kilos (10st10lb) can hold about 400 grams of glucose as glycogen, or the amount of glucose in seven large McDonald’s fries.

any excess glucose is turned into fat and stored in our fat reserves. And that’s one of the ways we gain weight. And then some. Because it’s not just glucose that our body has to deal with, it must also dispose of fructose. And unfortunately, fructose cannot be turned into glycogen and stored in the liver and the muscles. The only thing that fructose can be stored as is 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 enters the bloodstream and contributes to an increased risk of heart disease.

The absence of fructose means that fewer molecules end up as fat.

Ironically, many processed foods that are ‘fat-free’ contain a lot of sucrose, so the fructose in it is turned into fat after we digest it.

the more glucose spikes we experience, the more insulin is released in our bodies. In the long term, chronically elevated levels of insulin bring problems of their own. Too much insulin is the root cause of obesity, type 2 diabetes, polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) and more.

When we say ‘I want to lose weight,’ what we’re actually saying is, ‘I want to empty my fat cells of the fat they contain so that they deflate like balloons and reduce in size, bringing down my waist size.’ To do so, we need to be in ‘fat-burning’ mode. Just as Jerry could tap into his starch reserves at night, 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.

But this happens only when our insulin levels are low. If there is insulin

present, our body is prevented from...

In a 2021 study of 5,600 people, Canadian scientists showed that weight loss is always preceded by insulin decrease.

One day at work, around 11 a.m., I had grown so sleepy that I could barely move my fingers to click my mouse. Focusing on the task at hand was impossible. So, with a lot of effort, I stood up, walked to the office kitchen and poured myself a large black coffee. I drank the whole cup – and still I was exhausted. I checked my glucose levels: they had been on a steep downward slope since a big spike after a breakfast made of a salt-and-chocolate-chip cookie and a cappuccino

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.

a glucose spike can also bring on poor mood or anxiety.

many of us feel hungry again shortly after we eat – and here again, it has to do with glucose. If you compare two meals that contain the same number of calories, the one that leads to a smaller glucose spike will keep you feeling full for longer. Calories aren’t everything

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.

As we eat, we experience more glucose spikes, and insulin rushes in to store excess glucose as fat, which then increases the action of ghrelin. The more

weight we put on, the hungrier we get. It’s an unfortunate, vicious and unfair cycle.

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 centre 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.

Flattening our glucose curve leads to fewer cravings.

Remember your grandfather and his terrible post-retirement gig? When his cabin was stuffed with too much coal, he had to give up shovelling, and the train stopped. The same thing happens to our mitochondria: too much glucose makes them quit, energy production is compromised, and we are tired.

When we eat something that tastes sweet, we may think that we are helping our body get energised, but it’s just an impression caused by the dopamine rush in our brain that makes us feel high. With every spike, we are impairing the long-term ability of our mitochondria. Diets that cause glucose rollercoasters lead to higher fatigue than those that flatten glucose curves.

women with insulin resistance are twice as likely to have regular migraine headaches as women who don’t. When sufferers’ insulin levels are lowered, things seem to get better: when treated with a medication that reduced the amount of insulin in the body, over half of a group of 32 people experienced a significant reduction in migraine frequency.

When we eat in a way that flattens our glucose curves, acne clears up, pimples get smaller and inflammation is tamed. In a study in males aged 15 to 25, the diet that resulted in the flattest glucose curves led to a significant reduction in acne compared to a diet that caused glucose spikes.

Depending on your diet, you may have spiked your glucose (and fructose) tens of thousands more times than your neighbour has by the time you reach 60. This will influence not just how old you look externally but how old you are internally. The more often we spike, the faster we age.

Glycation, free radicals and the subsequent inflammation are responsible for the slow degradation of our cells – what we call ageing. 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

Of all organs, the brain uses the most energy. It’s home to a lot of mitochondria. That means that when there is excess glucose in our body, our brain is vulnerable to the consequences. The neurons in our brain feel oxidative stress as any other cells do: repeated glucose spikes, because they increase oxidative stress, lead to neuroinflammation and eventually cognitive dysfunction.

Alzheimer’s and glucose levels are so closely connected that Alzheimer’s is sometimes called ‘type 3 diabetes’ or ‘diabetes of the brain’. For instance, people with type 2 diabetes are four times as likely to develop Alzheimer’s as people without diabetes.

Your brain doesn’t have sensory nerves, so when something is wrong, it can’t alert you with pain as other organs do. Instead, you feel mental disturbances – such as poor mood.

one of the processes set off by glucose spikes – can cause holes in the gut lining, so that toxins that aren’t supposed to get through do get through (this is what leads to leaky gut). This in turn leads to food allergies and other autoimmune diseases, such as Crohn’s disease and rheumatoid arthritis.

The gut and the brain are connected by 500 million neurons (that’s a lot, but the brain contains a whopping 100 billion). Information is sent back and forth between them all the time, which could be why what we eat, and whether or not we have glucose spikes, affects how we feel.

First, glucose and fructose: the lining of our blood vessels is made of cells. These cells are particularly vulnerable to mitochondrial stress – and glucose and fructose spikes lead to oxidative stress. As a result, the cells suffer and lose their smooth shape. The lining of the vessels becomes bumpy, and fat particles get stuck more easily along the uneven surface.

Second, insulin: when our levels of insulin are too high, our liver starts producing LDL pattern B. This is a small, dense kind of cholesterol that creeps along the edges of the vessels, where it’s likely to get caught. (LDL pattern A is large, buoyant and harmless – we get it from eating dietary fat.)

Finally, if and when that cholesterol is oxidised – which happens the more glucose, fructose and insulin are present – it lodges under the lining of our blood vessels and sticks there. Plaque builds up and o...

Nine out of ten doctors still measure total LDL cholesterol to diagnose heart disease and prescribe statins if it’s too high. But what’s important is LDL pattern B and inflammation. To add to the problem, statins lower LDL pattern A, but they don’t lower the problematic pattern B. This is why statins don’t decrease the risk of a first heart attack.

Doctors can better measure heart disease risk by looking at what’s called the triglycerides-to-HDL ratio

(which tells us about the presence of the small, dense LDL pattern B), and C-reactive protein (which tells us about inflammation levels). Triglycerides become LDL pattern B in our bodies. So by measuring triglycerides, we can gauge the amount of the problematic LDL pattern B in our system.

It turns out that insulin levels are an important piece of information used by the brain and your gonads, or sex organs, to decide whether your body is a safe environment in which to conceive. If your insulin is out of whack, your body isn’t too keen on reproducing, because it suggests that you aren’t healthy. Both women and men with high insulin levels are more likely to be infertile.

Insulin resistance is the root cause of type 2 diabetes: liver, muscle and fat cells need larger and larger quantities of insulin to take up the same amount of glucose. Eventually, the system doesn’t work any more. Glucose is no longer stored away as glycogen or starch, even though our pancreas produces growing quantities of insulin. The result is that the glucose levels in our body are increased for good. As our insulin resistance gets worse, we go from prediabetes (fasting glucose levels above 5.5 mmol/L) to type 2 diabetes (above 7.0 mmol/L).

Two meals consisting of the same foods (and therefore the same nutrients and the same calories) can have vastly different impacts on our body depending on how their components are eaten. I was taken aback when I read the scientific papers that proved this, notably a seminal one out of Cornell University in 2015: if you eat the items of a meal containing starch, fibre, sugar, protein and fat in a specific order, you reduce your overall glucose spike by 73 per cent, as well as

your insulin spike by 48 per cent.

What is the right order? It’s fibre first, protein and fat second, sta...

A startling study from 2016 proved the finding even more definitively: two groups with type 2 diabetes were given a standardised diet for eight weeks and asked to either eat their food in the right order or eat it however they pleased. The group who ate their food in the right order saw a significant reduction in their HbA1c level, which means they started reversing their type 2 diabetes. The other group, eating the exact same food and number of calories but in no particular order, didn’t see an improvement in their condition.

Anything you eat lands in your sink, then flows through to your pipe, where it is broken down and absorbed into your bloodstream. Every minute, on average, about three calories’ worth of food trickle

through from sink to pipe. (This process is called gastric emptying.) If starches or sugars are the first thing to hit your stomach, they get to your small intestine very quickly. There, they are broken down into glucose molecules, which then make it through to the bloodstream very quickly. That creates a glucose spike. The more carbs you eat and the quicker you eat them, the more forcefully the load of glucose appears – the bigger the glucose spike. Say you have both pasta and vegetables on your plate (broccoli, anyone? I love broccoli) and you eat the pasta first, then the broccoli. The pasta, which is a starch, turns into glucose as it is quickly digested. The broccoli then ‘sits’ on top of the pasta and waits its turn to go through the pipe.

However, consuming the veggies first and the carbs second significantly changes what happens. Begin by munching on the broccoli. Broccoli is a vegetable, and vegetables contain plenty of fibre. As we’ve seen, fibre isn’t broken down into glucose by our digestive system. Instead, it goes through from sink to pipe to… sewage, slowly and unchanged. But that’s not all.