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

by Jessie Inchauspé

Fibre has three superpowers: first, it reduces the action of alpha-amylase, the enzyme that breaks starch down into glucose molecules. Second, it slows down gastric emptying: when fibre is present, food trickles from sink to pipe more slowly. Finally, it creates a viscous mesh in the small intestine; this mesh makes it harder for glucose to make it through to the bloodstream. Through these mechanisms, fibre slows down the breakdown and absorption of any glucose that lands in the sink after it; the result is that fibre flattens our glucose curves. Any starch or sugar that we eat after fibre will have a reduced effect on our body. We’ll get the same pleasure from eating it but with fewer consequences.

Foods containing fat also slow down gastric emptying, so eating them before rather than after carbs also helps flatten our glucose curves. The takeaway? Eating carbs after everything else is the best move.

Rotting happens when bacteria lodge on food and start digesting that food to fuel their own growth. The white and green specks you see on a strawberry you’ve left too long in the fridge are bacteria growing. First off, rotting takes days or weeks to happen. It can’t happen in a few hours, which is about how long it takes for fruit to be digested. Second, our stomach is an acidic environment (pH 1–2), and any environment with a pH below 4 prevents bacterial overgrowth (and therefore rotting). Nothing can rot in the stomach, and in fact, the stomach, together with the oesophagus, is the place where there are the fewest bacteria in our entire digestive tract.

in Roman times, a meal generally started with eggs and ended with fruit.

To be fair, maybe the doctors of the 1300s were not completely off the wall when they recommended that you eat fruit alone. A handful of people have shared with me that they have to eat fruit on its own; otherwise they experience discomfort, such as bloating or gas. It all comes back to listening to our body. Starches and sugars last are the right way to go, unless we personally feel that it doesn’t agree with us.

Many different timings were studied in clinical settings – 0 minutes, 10 minutes, 20 minutes; they all seem to work. As

long as you eat starch and sugars last, even if it’s without stopping, you will flatten your glucose curve.

This plant-made substance is incredibly important to us: it fuels the good bacteria in our gut, strengthens our microbiome, lowers our cholesterol levels and makes sure everything runs smoothly.

To measure how many calories are in, say, a doughnut, here’s what to do: dehydrate the doughnut and place it in a cubicle submerged in a water bath. Then set the doughnut on fire (yes, really) and measure by how many degrees the water around it warms up. Multiply the temperature change by the amount of water in the container, the energy capacity of water (which is 1 calorie

per gram per degree), and you’ll get the number of calories in the doughnut.

Judging a food based on its calorie content is like judging a book by its page count. The fact that a book is 500 pages long can certainly give you some information about how long it will take to read (about 17 hours), but it’s unfortunately reductive.

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.

In fact, recent science shows that people who focus on flattening their glucose curves can eat more calories and lose more fat more easily than people who eat fewer calories but do not flatten their glucose curves.