Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnEJrgc1BCk
I'm gonna be completely honest with you here it's important I hope it's a subject matter of glucose was boring until I read your book and then I was like oh my God Jesse introspect the glucose goddess is a biochemist an author teaching us the best hacks to eat right without giving up the foods that we love glucose is your body's favorite source of energy your brain cells are using glucose to think speak move so when you flood your body with too much glucose too quickly what happens is what I call a glucose Spike the more spikes you have the faster you die in your book you talk about these 10 hacks yeah eat food in the right order yeah after you eat move drink vinegar before you eat yeah you're such a weirdo learn the glucose hacks and then just eat everything you love like that's the thing you have to understand why do you care about this stuff well I went through my own sort of Health Journey it was awful and I was like I need to figure out how to fix myself like I need to understand what's going on because otherwise I just don't want to live anymore it was really to that point I was like either I figure out how to fix this or this is just too painful of an existence before this episode starts I have a small favor to ask from you two months ago 74 of people that watch this channel didn't subscribe we're now down to 69 my goal is 50 so if you've ever liked any of the videos we've posted if you like this channel can you do me a quick favor and hit the Subscribe button it helps this channel more than you know and the bigger the channel gets as you've seen the bigger the guests get thank you and enjoy this episode [Music] Jesse Steven what is it that you do and why does it matter I teach people about how food impacts their body and it matters because most of us are unknowingly eating in a way that causes many of the symptoms that we suffer from on a daily basis so it matters because once people understand
how their dietary habits are impacting them and once they make change their whole universe upgrades all of the things that they thought were just who they were you know the poor energy the Cravings the acne the bad sleep the hormonal issues all of a sudden they can vanish and so they kind of reconnect with their true selves once they're passed all of those symptoms why do you care about this stuff many different reasons um one is a personal story the other is because I see a lot of people suffering from diseases that they don't understand and that unknowingly they're making worse my one big examples from one big example for me is people who have type 2 diabetes and a lot of people who have type 2 diabetes are eating in a way that's making it worse but they think they're eating in a way that's good for them and that breaks my heart into pieces you know I want to give people the power back I want to give people the information back because the landscape we live in you know the the marketing message is about food all the confusing packaging the confusing advice the fads that's really destructive and so I want to help people like clean all that up and the personal reason well I went through my own sort of Health Journey um that got me to a point where I realized that health is the most important thing in the world and if you don't have have that you really don't have much and I mean we can go into some detail into this since I guess we have some time and I don't usually go into detail about this topic I've sort of learned to you know brush over it and just give this short version I'm not interested initial version um long version so I grew up super healthy happy kid no health issues nobody in my family had any health issues it was very you know easy and then I'm 19 years old and I'm just you know becoming a teenager I'm at the peak of this kind of phase where I really want to be cool and I really want to show that like I'm a badass you know and so I'm on vacation with some friends in Hawaii of all places and it's four of
us my current best girlfriend and two guy friends and we go into the jungle just for a hike and the two guy friends were like super fit guys decide to jump off this waterfall this like 30 feet 30 waterfall and um like Jesse should do it too and so I was terrified and I did not want to do it but I really wanted to be cool I really wanted to be like I don't care like I can do whatever yeah I'm not scared so I decided to also jump off the waterfall spoiler alert it was not a good idea so I'm at the top of the the rocks and I'm looking down I'm like oh my God and my two friends are down there and they're like they tell me to land in the water really straight they say just make your body like a stick and make sure your feet touch the water first and I as I'm in the air as soon as I leap off the edge of the Cliff of course when you're falling you get that sensation in your stomach they're like and I feel that and I just freak out like I am terrified and so midair instead of Landing really nice and straight I kind of like try to stop the fall so I sort of bend my knees a little bit but like we're talking a really small change and as soon as my tailbone hits the water I feel a huge pain in my back like like a really intense pain and so I go under the water I come back out and I'm like swearing I'm like wow and my friends are like oh my God what's happening so I managed to climb out of the water of the pool and I'm in so much pain but there's nothing visible in my body there's no blood there's no bruising my back looks normal so I'm like I don't know what happened I'm in so much pain they're like okay well let's walk back to the car you know don't know what happened so I walk back a mile in the jungle you know with what I ended up learning was a broken back um which was super dangerous yeah through adrenaline everything was um just pumping and allowing me to do that 24 hours go by I don't know what's happening I'm at home with my parents and like I don't know I'm in so much pain but you couldn't see anything on my
body so it was like I know so I decided to just steep it off the next day I wake up I'm like I know um next day I wake up I'm still in a lot of pain so I get taken to it like an osteopath or I don't know a chiropractor or something and um he sees me arrive and he puts like a finger on my back and I like ow he's like no no you have to go to the hospital so 24 hours later I get to the hospital they finally do a scan and they say yeah one of your vertebrae is in 13 pieces you need to not move anymore here's a corset you're not allowed to move until it gets fixed because if you move if one of the pieces of your vertebrae like dislodges a little bit you could rupt your spinal cord and then you're paralyzed so I was like okay I spent two weeks at home in the house in Hawaii we're trying to figure out where to get surgery so I'm just in bed I'm not allowed to move basically just to go to the bathroom end up being flown back to Europe on like a medical plane to a clinic in Zurich an amazing Place once I get there another week of waiting until the surgery arrives so at this point I'm three weeks in three weeks with a broken back terrified about what's going to happen I haven't been able to move my body haven't been able to move any stress from my body I'm like really not okay they're giving me painkillers like the whole thing is intense you can't move your body for what two to two weeks or so three weeks three for the surgery I was not allowed to move I had to stay in bed because of the risk as we were figuring out what to do as my parents were like okay is she gonna get surgery in LA and Zurich like you know you have to figure out because then I had to stay in the hospital after the surgery so it's a real decision of like where are you going to have the operation and so I'm in the clinic in Zurich and the doctor comes up to me he's like okay so listen this is what's gonna happen um we're gonna open your body from the side we're gonna take some organs out clean up the vertebrae close the side flip you over open from the back open the spine put a metal cage in put the broken bones back in drill six like Three Inch Nails into your spine and then put some rods and then we'll close you back oh by the
way there's a risk we're going to perforate along but like hopefully you know it won't happen I was like what the [ __ ] thank you yeah so anyway all this to say that I was really really really really really really really scared of dying it was [ __ ] awful and I was like if I just wake up if I wake up on the other side of this I will be filled with gratitude for like the rest of my life you know that was the feeling so anyway surgery happens I wake up and instead of gratitude I start feeling a humongous amount of pain like 100x the amount of pain from the actual breaking my back my entire body is on fire all of my legs are just like inflamed like crazy they're giving me like sleeping pills and [ __ ] I'm having the craziest nightmares a nurse comes into my room every three hours to inject you know like opioids in my leg I mean it's just like [ __ ] nightmare like total total nightmare I can't move at all because if I move my body the scars feel like they're gonna rip open I lose like 20 pounds in 10 days I haven't eaten anything I don't eat anything for like two weeks anyway so horrible physical stuff but the good news is the physical bit actually heals like in three months I'm totally fine no more pain feeling strong exercising again no problem but then the real problem starts happening my brain starts not feeling okay I start feeling like I'm a bit like in a dream like I have this weird sensation of like every instead of everything being 3D it's now 2D and I'm kind of feel like I'm in a movie and I look at my hands and they don't look like mine and I start having panic attacks when I see myself in the mirror so like my brain starts breaking and I had never experienced any mental health issues when I was younger so I I super Clueless so anyway um is there some time for that a medical term for that yeah the closest thing that I've found is depersonalization which is losing touch with reality and yourself and I always felt like when those episodes happen I feel like I leave my body like I'm kind of looking from above and also I become super super scared of just existence
so being alive becomes the scariest thing I can ever imagine and that still happens today very very very rarely when was the last time it happened actually two days ago I had like 10 minutes of it because I had just taken the plane all the way here to California and I felt quite ungrounded and I could tell there was some stress in my body that was not moving but now when it happens like I know how to fix it I know what's going on but back then I had no clue so for a year I felt like that super clueless and I didn't understand what in my surroundings or in how I was living was making it better or worse I was completely clueless I was like I have this horrible thing happening to me nobody understands it I feel crazy but I also feel like [ __ ] this might be the rest of my life like this might just be my life now this immense pain and Terror at just existing so out of all this nightmare um emerges a very clear thought in my head which is if you don't have your health you have nothing like it's Health First like this is the number one most important thing in life and bear in mind I'm 19 years old which is kind of a young age to have that realization and Stephen I was like I need to figure out how to fix myself like I need to understand what's going on because otherwise I just don't want to live anymore it was really to that point I was like either I figure out how to fix this or this is just too painful of an existence isn't it such a shame that it requires often a traumatic event where our health is tested or um we realize the valuability of it is that the right word yeah um for us to start thinking and caring about it I think about this all the time you know one of the most pivotal shifts in my life occurred during the pandemic where I vicariously saw the entire world struggling um and one of the factors that exacerbated that struggle or increased your chances of being susceptible to the illness was your your health and I watched vicariously from this
from this lockdowned apartment in the north of England through the TV screens as all of these people were being rushed to hospital Etc and it was it was the moment that the wake-up call I needed I didn't need something to fail in my health I needed to watch the world struggle because of Health for me to go oh my God okay so my health is my first Foundation it's not the business it's not this it's not my dog my cat my girlfriend whatever because if you remove my health I lose everything and it seems like you had that because of a tragic incident at 19 years old where you go oh you like put your priorities in order it's a bit like that saying you know you have two lives and your second life starts when you realize you only have one interesting yeah and that's a beautiful beautiful saying and yes it is tragic that that kind of stuff needs to happen I think that life should be lived backwards we would have such a better time we'd be so much more grateful if we started our life you know at 100 years old with a body that's breaking down less energy more difficulty and if you just got younger you know every year you'd be so grateful like oh my God like I'm getting you know I don't know my biceps back or my energy back or whatever and it's so tragic that we just go through life never realizing the you know the the wealth that's just in front of us and complaining about what's wrong and then not realizing that in 10 years it's going to get worse and worse but listen yes them the tragic incident is often a jumping off point for realizing how important health is yeah you wrote a book called The glucose Revolution the life-changing power of balancing your blood sugar through that book last year why did you write a book about glucose of all the things in health and food you could have written about why glucose right it's so interesting essentially after having this realization that I needed to figure out how my body worked I went on like a quest you know with different chapters and so first chapter was I was living in London before I was studying mathematics and I moved to Georgetown in the U.S Washington DC to study biochemistry in
grad school to learn about how the body worked and then I went to Silicon Valley to work in genetics because I wanted to understand her DNA you know I was trying to like piece together as much as I could to try to understand how my body functioned uh so that I could feel better so that in the morning I could wake up not terrified of being alive that was the bar you know the bar was quite low and even though DNA and studying it was interesting it actually your DNA doesn't give you a lot of information about what you need to do to feel good your DNA can tell you you know where you're from what your traits are maybe if you have an increased risk of a disease in the future but your DNA doesn't tell you exactly what you need to do what really matters more in terms of determining how we feel on a daily basis and how quickly we age and if we can just still kayak when we're 65 has much more to do with how we live you know how we eat how we move our environment what we do so I learned that as I was in this genetics company and when I was there something incredible happened I discovered the world of glucose and now I'm talking about this you know on a daily basis and writing books about it I discovered that my mental health got worse when my glucose also known as blood sugar was not healthy steady and balanced I discovered that when my blood sugar levels were kind of like a roller coaster these episodes of depersonalization happened much more frequently there was even this one instance where I had and I was able to see my blood sugar levels with a glucose monitor that I wore for a couple weeks I was able to see one of the spikes in blood sugar actually triggering the episode I was like whoa I'm finally understanding a clue how I'm eating and how that affects my glucose levels is then in turn affecting how I'm feeling in my mental health and for me that was like the jumping off point I was like whoa this is fascinating and I just Dove really deep into it and I studied it you know for four years I've been talking about it for that long and ended up writing a book about it because it's actually
really important for all of us to know about this molecule and to learn to manage it they call you the glucose goddess I call myself the glucose goddess I know they call you yes yes exactly I wanted to find a catchy name after you know two years um talking about this on social media at first my account was just my name Jesse interest pay which is really hard to write and pronounce and spells so I needed a catchy name so I was like glucose girl glucose gal and then I thought glucose goddess you said there that you know watching your glucose monitor presumably on your phone it was connected to your phone um you could identify that the causation between a spike in your glucose and mental health implications but okay what else why else does glucose matter yeah that's a very good question because you know not everybody has these depersonalization episodes so when I first got that piece of information I was like okay glucose is affecting how I'm feeling let me see in the scientific papers what else does glucose matter for it and I went into like a massive deep dive into all of the scientific studies about glucose that I could find I had like a thousand tabs open on my computer browser I just went really really really deep and I discovered some amazing things so first I discovered that I was not alone that most people who don't have diabetes still experience these blood sugar spikes potentially on a daily basis without knowing it and that's a really good piece of information because for years we thought only if you have diabetes should your glucose levels be of any concern to you you know I was kind of like either you have diabetes and need to learn how to manage glucose or you don't have diabetes and like don't even worry about it now we know that everybody can be suffering from these spikes without knowing it so that was a huge Revelation for me and that study was very recent I think it was from 2018. so when I discovered you know four years ago it had just come out so I was like whoa like stuff is changing on this topic we're realizing the importance of it for everybody
second I was like okay let's look at all the symptoms that are associated with these spikes from the scientific studies right so the most common symptoms of glucose spikes are things like cravings for sweet Foods yeah multiple times a day um he looks at me as if you know that I have that problem and you're right but you should have just said it no I'm just like I was just curious like no you're looking and it's fine you've probably heard me talk about the sweet dream of my house that I used to have it's gone now but um none of us are perfect Jesse I'm not perfect either when you say Cravings are you is does that kind of explain why when I have one cookie I don't have cookies these days you know I'm a changed man but say I were to have one cookie why I then want another cookie yes but sometimes I'll get into a I'm a changed man sometimes I'll get into a cookie week where like I want I have a cookie on Monday and because I've had that cookie on Monday like Tuesday I'm showing up or Wednesday I'm showing up for a cookie wow and then I can fall out of like a sugar cycle where um because I've not had sugar in a while I don't I don't want sugar yeah so what I'm asking there is does that Sugar craving how long does that last question do you know what I mean yeah absolutely because I've wondered if it was like a couple of days like if I've not had sugar for three days then I don't have the Cravings anymore or is it shorter than that well listen from the studies we know a few things we know that one like if you have a cookie so cookies contain you know sugar and starches and sugar and starches are what increase your glucose levels in your blood so when you have a cookie up glucose Spike okay increasing concentration and then a glucose drop after the spike this drop has been shown to activate the craving Center in your brain literally Telling You Stephen find something else to eat that sweet ASAP go back to the jewel yeah so your brain controls that part of your psyche like your brain is telling you to go find something else that is sweet and so when people have
cravings you know they often may feel something like oh I feel guilty I feel ashamed I have no willpower like I'm so weak I'm like no no no no no no no it's not your fault it's absolutely not your fault the craving you're experiencing now might have been caused usually by breakfast by the way by the breakfast that you had or the thing you ate a couple hours ago and I call that sort of starting the the sugar addiction cycle right so let's say it's just one day you have the cookie Spike drop you crave something else then if you keep having spikes for one day two day three day phrase It's very possible that on day four you know that particular drop for some reason is making you want to have a cookie most of us are on this glucose roller coaster and have cravings multiple times a day I knew it wasn't my fault it's not your fault babe it's not your fault it's not your fault and then something else that makes that even less your fault is that when we eat something sweet it releases a molecule called dopamine in our brain and dopamine is a pleasure molecule it's the molecule that gets released when we have sex when we play video games when we do like illegal drugs humans love dopamine and so when you eat sugar or something sweet it's a really easy way to get a hit and dopamine is addictive so you have those two things happening that definitely you know when you cut out sugar completely you realize those Cravings go away because you no longer have the spikes and the dopamine addiction going on some people will hear that and go it sounds like my body is sabotaging me do you see what I mean it's because that's kind of how absolutely and that breaks my heart your body just wants you to stay alive like your body is not sabotaging you but unfortunately when we don't realize that the way we're eating is causing some of these symptoms we might feel like our body is fighting us we might feel like oh my body hates me my body's always doing this blah blah I'm like listen your body is speaking to you all those symptoms you're feeling those Cravings the acne the you know irregular energy levels all these hormonal issues whatever those are actually messages coming from your body telling you Hey Stephen there's a glucose roller coaster
happening here like help me fix it I think your body wants you to work in partnership with it and is trying to alert you with all of these symptoms so instead of like blaming our body or feeling like uh bad body for doing this and that if you shift it a little bit you're like okay let me balance my glucose levels and learn how to do this in an easy way and then as you balance them you see that all these symptoms go away and you feel like Oh I'm a friend with my body now I'm taking care of it is taking care of me and that was a big realization for me in my health Journey because when I was having those mental health issues I felt exactly like that I was like why is this happening like what did I do you know and it was actually my body trying to tell me that there was lots of things that were going wrong one of them being my glucose levels so anyway yes I'm all right in thinking that my body is not built or designed for the world that it currently lives in and that's part of the the battle like absolutely absolutely because just if you look at for example glucose levels right like the way nature intended us to consume glucose was in Plants right and when we consume something sweet it was usually in a piece of fruit but pieces of fruit back in the day when Nature created them they were much smaller much less sweet they had way more seeds and fiber in them so it didn't create that big of a glucose Spike but human beings because of this desire for sweetness and pleasure have been breeding plants and fruits to be extra sweet extra juicy so the bananas and the oranges you see today are not natural at all they're the results of Millennia breeding a little bit like how we took gray wolves and we bred them into Chihuahuas for fun basically chihuahuas are not like natural animals right they're the result of breeding we did the same thing for a lot of pieces of fruit and then humans were like how can we make this go even further how about we extract the sugar from the fruits get rid of all that fiber and water stuff and concentrate it into table sugar and then how about we put that in drinks and make like sodas or fruit juice you know so as human beings we've created a food landscape that is 100 causing all these glucose bikes and
My Philosophy today is not get rid of sugar don't eat sugar anymore I'm more like okay sugars everywhere we love it it gives us pleasure let's learn to eat it in a way that doesn't cause these spikes and doesn't harm our physical and mental health so much we're going to get into yeah exactly how to do that I want to get a little bit back Upstream we were talking about the symptoms absolutely so we you've covered the Cravings um what other give me some of the the short and the long-term symptoms of these the glucose roller coaster and then I want to know what glucose is because absolutely a better place to start no no I think symptoms is cool because most people will recognize a lot of these in their own lives so Cravings is the most common one then unsteady energy levels so feeling tired throughout the day maybe you have chronic fatigue maybe you need a lot of coffee to get through the day you know maybe playing with your kids is exhausting picking up the groceries is exhausting just like you're tired you know you're eating but you're tired very common symptom and we'll get into why that happens maybe in a bit those are the two most common short-term ones then what about memory Ah that's a good question so the more glucose bikes you have the more the neurons in your brain are gonna work like less well so one of the most common symptoms of glucose specs on the brain is actually brain fog so feeling like you can't really remember stuff too well um everything's a little bit blurry that's basically your neurons not being able to communicate as quickly as they usually do and it's often felt as brain fog but then there's a huge link between glucose and long-term brain problems like dementia and Alzheimer's some people even call Alzheimer's type 3 diabetes because it's so linked to your glucose levels so the brain if you want your brain to be an optimal top shape studying your glucose levels is really key what if I want to sleep like a baby yeah absolutely also so the more spikes you have the less restful and deep your sleep will be so if you want to sleep like a baby absolutely if you're somebody going
through menopause and you want to reduce menopause symptoms also looking at your glucose levels is a very important place to start because the more spikes we have the worse those symptoms get talking about hormones there's also a huge link between glucose levels and fertility so in females today you know there's more and more rates of infertility there's something called polycystic ovarian syndrome which is more and more common that also is extremely linked to your glucose levels and again the first place to look if you want to fix your hormones is balancing your glucose other stuff and there's a lot of symptoms here because glucose affects every single system in the body so there's not a single disease or condition that doesn't get better when you balance your glucose levels essentially but I'll go into a few more um examples skin so inflammation is a direct consequence of glucose spikes and on the on the skin inflammation can be seen as acne eczema psoriasis I have no idea you know there's two words that I've just exploded into like popular conversation over the last I'm going to say 12 months but you know I'm not that deep to to know how long this conversation has been happening but one of those words is the word glucose I've just seen it everywhere all of a sudden and the second word which I've seen even in more places is that word you just used inflammation yeah what is inflammation inflammation is is a stress response from your body the ory that's supposed to help you and clean things up so for example when you get sick when there's a virus or a bug that's attacking you your body essentially creates inflammation to combat that enemy the problem is inflammation now often happens against your own body or just like chronically at a low level and that causes many many many issues so it's a state of stress of the body and it happens in all of us it can it can happen in all of the cells in our body absolutely and today three out of five people in the world will die of an inflammation-based disease three out of five three out of five the World
Health Organization calls inflammation like one of the biggest problems of our Century it's basically just a way to say that your body is not healthy there's problems going on within because inflammation can be caused by so many things you know by like smoking alcohol glucose bikes stress environmental toxins it's just like a state of unhealth of your body if you will and so on the skin the most common sort of visible consequences of that information are acne psoriasis eczema um and then talking about skin so the more glucose spikes you have in your body the faster you age and that shows on your skin as wrinkles but also on the insides things slowly deteriorate and break down and there's a funny uh image for this so from the moment you're born your body is slowly cooking you slowly cook let me explain like a chicken in the oven from the moment you're born and then when you're fully cooked you die your face this concept of cooking is basically aging and it's the technical term for it is called glycation and the more glucose spikes you have the faster this process happens so if you want to age less quickly and if you know when you look at two people who are 65 one is clearly younger than the other like biologically right and you can affect you can impact how quickly that aging is going on one of the ways being through reducing your glucose bikes okay and then long term we talked about type 2 diabetes being the leading sort of long-term condition linked to glucose levels so the more glucose spikes you have the faster you'll develop pre-diabetes and type 2 diabetes and then finally also mentioned that glucose levels are linked to cancer and heart disease so essentially to to give you a summary if you have a lot of glucose bikes things are not going to go super well you're going to have lots of symptoms short-term medium term long term if you currently feel if you're like I could I could feel better than I do you know which most of us probably feel then balancing your glucose levels is a really really freaking important place to start it's like the the base
it's the base layer of your physical and mental health it's really key but most of us don't have that sorted so to summarize yeah this short and long term symptoms there that I've written down here short-term symptoms cons if you if we aren't able to flatten our glucose levels yeah then we Face the chance of having constant hunger and Cravings chronic fatigue poor sleep colds we talk you talked a little bit about the immune system and the implications there brain folk you described as long-term brain fog um longer term effects acne aging arthritis Alzheimer's dementia cancer risk mental health infertility challenges yeah and to be clear like glucose is not everything right there's many things that matter in our health like emotional connection Medical Care you know sleep stress exercise but learning to balance your glucose levels is like learning again have fun have a fun image to use for this it's like imagine you're walking into an airplane and before you go to your at your seats you kind of peek into the cockpit and you're like whoa lots of buttons in that cockpit on the ceiling on the sides there's all these leverages like oh I'm happy I don't have to fly This Plane you're the passenger right and you're happy the pilots know what they're doing in the case of our our body it's interesting because we're both the passenger we feel what's going on you know we're kind of victims to what's going on but we're also the pilots we're in charge of our decisions we decide what we eat what we do but often we have no clue how to fly the plane we have no idea how our body works so it becomes very complicated to figure out where to start and we have all these opinions is marketing blah blah and it can be really confusing and and and quite daunting so to me learning to balance your glucose levels is like learning about the most important lever in the cockpit of the plane it's like if you know about this lever you can take off you can fly you can land it's like the most important thing and it will help you get to a point where you're kind of cruising and you're like okay I kind of have a handle
on things my symptoms are kind of getting better so to me that's that's the way to think about it so this begs the question which I probably should have started with which is what is glucose now in my brain yeah tell me what you think which is a slightly um undeveloped brain on this subject matter um I've just always thought of it as sugar yeah so I've just thought of it as the Sugar Ray is turned into this thing called glucose and then the glucose runs around in my body in my blood and seeps into everything yeah well that's a pretty that's a pretty pretty good thank you um like high level definition um and I think that's what most people who know a little bit about the topic um think so let me explain so you know exactly what it is because that definition while it's what most people think it's actually a bit incomplete so I'm going to give you like the 101 Basics so you understand what's going on explain it like a 10 year old absolutely so glucose is your body's favorite source of energy every single cell in your body uses glucose for energy so you know right now both of our heart cells are using glucose to pump your brain cells are using glucose to think and speak my you know hand cells are using glucose to move Etc so every part of your body uses glucose for energy it's really really important and the main way that us as human beings we give our body this important substance is through eating foods and specifically through eating two categories of foods starchy Foods so that's like bread pasta rice potatoes and sweet Foods anything from your favorite cookie to a banana to a Coca-Cola anything sweet so starchy and sweet foods contain glucose and when we eat them the glucose is given to our body so now you might think okay I want energy right my body I want to give my body as much energy as possible right I want to feel good I want to have energy so you might think okay I should eat as much starchy and sweet Foods as possible yeah to give my body as much energy as possible the cookies are good for me well this is where the whole logic thing breaks down
it's a bit like plants so let's say I go on vacation and I'm like Stephen can you please take care of my houseplants you'll be like of course Jesse Yeah my pleasure I would love to help you so you would go to so you would go to my house and give my plants a little bit of water right because you know the plants need some water but if you gave the plants too much water they would end up drowning and dying and I would come back from my vacation all my plants would be dead so the plant got a bit too much of a good thing and that caused issues the human body is the same some glucose is good too much glucose causes all these issues and most of us are eating in a way that gives way too much glucose too quickly to our body and that's why we feel all these symptoms so what's going on at a cellular level when I flood my body with glucose so there are three sort of main processes that I want to tell you about on this topic so when you flood your body with too much glucose too quickly what happens is what I call a glucose Spike so a glucose spike is just simply a sort of Rapid increase in how much glucose is in your system so it goes if you have a glucose monitor you can kind of see it it goes like just goes up really fast the concentration and so the first thing that we need to look at is your my2 mitochondria so your mitochondria are like little um sort of oval organelles inside of your cells and they kind of had a squiggly line in the middle when we represent them in drawings these mitochondria are in charge of turning glucose into energy they're super freaking important they take the glucose from the food and they do some magic and outputs energy so you can do stuff like I don't know walk run think whatever so when a glucose Spike happens all of that glucose heads straight to the mitochondria because that's where it gets processed right and your mitochondria unfortunately while they like a steady influx of glucose during a spike when you give them way too much glucose way too quickly they kind of like shut down they're like I just TMI I cannot too much information like I can't deal with this they sort of go on
strike they get stressed out and they kind of break down so that's a real problem because you just ate all this food because you were like I want to give my body energy right sugar in the morning energy actually on the inside your mitochondria the very things responsible for making energy they break down when you give them too much glucose to handle so that's the first thing that happens and when you mitochondria breakdown it increases how much stress there is in your body and it increases that thing we talked about inflammation which is not good and creates a lot of like terrain for a lot of diseases to happen so that's the first thing that happened glucose spikes mitochondria breakdown and you get tired not good second thing that happens is this thing called glycation that I explained which is aging the more spikes you have the more glycation happens quickly the faster you age on the outside with your wrinkles but also on the inside so the kayak when you're 65 is going to get harder and harder the more glycation happens when you're young for example and then finally so your body really wants to keep you alive as I mentioned like your body is pretty freaking awesome and it's really trying to protect you and so it has a technique that it deploys when a glucose spike is happening to get that level of glucose down because it knows like oof when glucose is very high like all this bad stuff happens so let me get that to go down your body releases something called insulin which comes from your pancreas and we love insulin she's dope she grabs all the extra glucose and she stores it away into your muscles into your liver and into your fat cells and that's one of the ways that you gain fat on your body is by having insulin take this extra glucose and stir it away can't you not just put it in my muscles unfortunately I'll call her and ask but no unfortunately you can't decide where it goes um and then while insulin is cool like long term too much insulin is the cause of type 2 diabetes so while she's helpful in the short term long term she causes all sorts of issues especially connected to fertility which is also
um something that we might want to talk about really fascinating topic is is that therefore conceivable you know I've got a friend that had um polycystic ovaries and um she said on a podcast that she has recently that she used to have a problem with um binge eating she talked about it and I as you said as you said that I kind of connected the two dots that her insulin spikes from her binge eating challenges might have had an impact on the polycystic ovaries and the infertility challenges she'd had she'd um she had very very irregular periods to the point at one point her period stopped completely and I was just wondering if there's obviously we can't diagnose someone we don't know but I'm just saying is there is there a link there potentially well listen it's hard for me to say but um what we do know is that you know polycystic ovarian syndrome is very tightly linked to glucose so the more spikes you have I mean potentially from the eating disorder but also just a lot of people even without an eating disorder have enough spikes to cause this issue the more spikes you have the more insulin you have in your body and then the more insulin you have in your female body the higher testosterone levels gets and so PCOS positive ovarian syndrome is kind of like a grouping of symptoms so um cystic ovaries Mist periods balding on the head hair growth on the face acne Etc that we kind of put into this package of like this is PCOS actually a lot of these are symptoms of just excess testosterone in a female body testosterone being the male sex hormone so again if you have PCOS it's very important to balance your glucose levels to get that testosterone down it's like the first thing to look at the first thing to fix and I get on a daily basis messages from readers who had PCOS use the hacks that I share don't have PCOS anymore got their periods back we're able to conceive naturally Etc so very tightly linked glucose and hormones this this drug insulin so it takes the takes the glucose and it's and by the way it's not really a drug it's like something your body makes but then you can also take it
um as a drug if you have diabetes for example so this chemical insulin it stores it stores the glucose in my my fat and my muscles and my liver yeah um how does that how does it have an impact then on weight gain and weight loss so if I've just had a glucose Spike insulin's been deployed yeah she's doing her work she's storing it in all those places does that impact my ability to gain and lose weight absolutely so when there's a lot of insulin around insulin when she's around she's like okay everybody stop we're only gonna be putting stuff into fat cells nothing can come out of fat cells so when when there's High insulin levels your fat cells become like a one-way Street things can go in to make them grow in size and quantity so it's one of the ways you gain fat on your body and nothing can come out and when people say like I want to lose fat on my body what they're really saying is I want to empty my fat cells so that you know my waist size reduces at the same time so yes the more insulin the harder it is to actually lose any fat I get it foreign I think I get it now um is there anything that's like missing from that that picture you've painted for me I I Now understand the relationship between what I put in my mouth the impact that has on my glucose levels it causes spikes and dips that causes a bunch of short and long-term consequences because of what's going on in my mitochondria and insulin is there is there a next step in that process that I need to be aware of so my insulin is now raised right yeah she shut down my fat cells she's doing her thing she's throwing it away is it the cro so The Chronic um deployment of insulin is what I think they call the type 2 diabetes yeah it's called insulin resistance so when you have a lot of insulin it's a bit like stops working basically exactly it's like coffee right right like first time you drink coffee you're like whoa and then over time the same amount of coffee doesn't do as much to you same with insulin so over time your body becomes less sensitive to it it doesn't really obey it anymore very well and that's called insulin resistance and that then
leads to type 2 diabetes but I think you got a pretty good overview of you know weed food creates glucose Spikes all of these biochemical processes then our body experiences these symptoms right we experience these symptoms of glucose spikes and I think the important thing to remember is that these symptoms again they're messages right they're not something that's happening randomly just to be annoying your body is not against you your body is just trying to keep you alive but as a consequence of maybe some of the ways you're eating all these symptoms are taking place quick word from one of our sponsors I have to say I've been on a bit of a journey with this brand because when I started my business in new territories when we first moved social chain to the to New York City the first place we went to was wework we moved four of our team members out to New York City and we built the business from there um I have to say there's something magical about weworks I've spent the last two or three weeks in LA in a wee work and as you walk in the front door every day it's almost like that sense of community that sense of magic excitement camaraderie is tangible and you don't get that when you're working at home you don't get that often when you're sat in your bed on your laptop there's something about getting out and getting into a wee work that makes me feel a sense of Entrepreneurship and and creativity and building and the way that we work to design both both in the way that they offer subscriptions so that you can work you know on demand but also that the flexibility of the contracts means that it's just the perfect place for businesses to scale their companies and if you haven't checked out where you work and you want to you can go go to we dot Co slash CEO and there you can get 50 off a trial day at wework close to you ladies and gentlemen our newest brand partnership will come is no surprise to regular listeners on this podcast the first episode of 2023 I was joined by the incredible Professor Tim Spector to hear more about his work at a company called Zoe using data to understand our bodies better so that we can live more fulfilled higher potential lives Zoe was born from the truth that our overall health is impacted by our
gut health by helping you to understand how your body is working so he can help you to reduce your risk of long-term disease and increase your energy levels for me this is the future and that is why I became an investor in the company and that is why they are now a sponsor of this podcast you can read up about everything they're doing and you can pre-order your Zoe program at joinzoe.com and they've been kind enough to offer an exclusive 10 off code CEO 10. so you can put that code in at checkout ceo10 thank you so much let's get back to the episode if this gluco roller coaster is bad for me yeah the spikes and the crashes how does one flatten the glucose curve in your book you talk about these 10 hacks yeah can we go through some of these hacks too that's for sure I think that's the most important really because Attack One hack one yeah eat food in the right order yeah what did you mean by that so to give some context like all the hacks in my books they are just summaries of scientific studies so when I was going really deep into all the science I found you know all these symptoms and conditions linked to spikes and I found also these amazing ways we could still eat everything we loved but without creating these spikes right so still eating everything you love but reducing any symptoms or any problems you might be having physical mentally okay so eat your food in the right order so next time you're faced with a meal listeners next time you're faced with a meal there's something amazing that you should know if you eat the ingredients in the meal in a specific order you can reduce the glucose Spike of that meal by up to 75 percent without changing how much you're eating what you're eating just the order has a massive impact on your glucose so you can still eat the same meal with way less spikes and way less consequences so the right order is veggies first I should make a t-shirt veggies first proteins and fats second and starches and sugars last so let's take an example of a meal Maybe Stephen what's the typical meal you have and then we'll add stuff for the
ingredients okay so let's say cookies that's your sugars let's say you're having cookies let's say I don't know you eat fish yeah okay let's say everything today I just I'm so other than snails I still got a little bit of a psychological issue there but I've never tried snails and I'm French really I just it just grosses me out something you need to figure out okay so let's say you have like some fish some broccoli some pasta some olive oil and avocado and a cookie so the right order for your glucose levels is gonna be the broccoli first then the fish then the pasta and the cookie and the avocado and olive oil you can kind of have it like with the with the fish now this is an interesting like theoretical thing to understand it might not always be very practical to just separate out your meal and be like okay this verse that then that then there's a few things you should know number one you don't actually have to wait between any of these foods you can just eat them one after the other and still get the amazing impact on your glucose levels and number two really the most important thing here that we need to learn from this scientific study is that the veggies should come first so what I do now and what you know my community does is that we all have always have a veggie starter at the beginning of a meal and then we just eat the rest of the meal kind of normally and that already has a massive impact on your glucose levels and how you're going to feel a lot of people when they do any do it very much in the opposite or in terms of like kind of they leave the veggies on the side of the plate you know I think when I was a kid I'd go for whatever was tasty first yeah when the whatever the green stuff I've always been for the pasta first yeah exactly and then it was like a requirement so often parents will say eat the [ __ ] greens yeah as well before you get your dessert you know that's interesting I mean although in restaurants obviously dessert comes last which is probably and in restaurants also you know bread usually comes first and so let me explain why it's so important to avoid having the bread first so bread is a starch and as I explained you know there's starches and
sugars and those are the two things that turn into glucose when we digest them and so when we eat something that contains glucose on an empty stomach so when we eat it first like a piece of bread the starch breaks down into glucose molecules in your stomach and then makes its way super quickly into your intestine and your bloodstream because there's nothing stopping it there's like hey just like roller coaster so it goes straight from your mouth to your bloodstream so very quickly the glucose makes its way to your bloodstream and increases the concentration and causes a spike now if you start your meal with veggies instead this is what happens veggies contain another Superwoman and I love how all my molecules and substances are female but anyway she's a superwoman fiber have you heard of fiber before you have fiber so veggies contain fiber and fiber when we eat it at the beginning of a meal she does something absolutely amazing when she arrives first in your stomach and digestive tract she makes its way from your stomach to your upper intestine and there she deploys itself like onto the walls of your intestine like in a cruel viscous protective mesh and just stays there protecting you that viscous mesh that fiber has created is then going to reduce the spike of your meal because all the glucose molecules arriving later on from like the pasta for example I'm not going to be able to make their way as quickly and as much through your intestine into your bloodstream because of the fiber Shield the glucose molecules are going to take way longer to make their way into your bloodstream as a result you get a smaller Spike but you still ate the same food just with some veggies first I know which is amazing so I so I when I go to a restaurant you know you go to some restaurants they give you bread others like the Japanese ones give you like edamame yeah that's much better yeah that's a that's a veggie right so any type of Veggie is going to be really helpful and I try to make it uh make up about like 30 of my meal and it can be anything they can be raw they can be cooked um in my new book I have like 35 amazing
veggie starter recipes you can dress them you can put you know some I don't know olive oil vinegar lemon cheese whatever onto it to make that veggie starter feel really delicious because it's going to protect you so much and if you're somebody who suffers from Cravings in the afternoon or unsteady energy I think this hack is a really powerful one to try out I often you know I'm a speed eater I'm going to be honest I'm not gonna I'm not gonna lie to you I am I tend to eat my meal super quick and I think the excuse I tell myself [ __ ] or not is that because I'm busy I just like yeah so inhale them yeah yeah yeah and when I'm I know because when if I eat something say with my girlfriend or whatever she's she she I mean she like literally blesses the food with her hands first and then she like takes her time I ate super fast too I'm like actually like it's a competition you know like yeah um and she's often said to me she's like okay just slow down like just and um one of the points that someone raised him at some point about my like super fast eating habit was that it is bad for me now I'm wondering from what you said there if the speed in which we has an impact on our glucose bikes as well if I ate slower can I flatten the curve absolutely baby yes really yeah she's right well yes then again listen I'm a very strong proponent of like pick your battles right and like yes we could all do better in so many different ways but also you know you're a speed eater that's fine maybe you just do it I'm trying to live my best life okay so if you want to slow down aging and do all that so you can do two things you can either just eat as quickly as you want but at a veggie starter at the beginning of your meal right that already is going to have very powerful impact on your glucose I would argue it probably will have a stronger impact than just eating the same meal more study because you're not going to eat the meal over like two hours right you might go from like three minutes to eight minutes it's not that big of a difference the veggie starter will have a much bigger impact on your glucose than just increasing that by a few minutes do you remember hack number three from your book uh stop counting calories
that's a ghost writer check I can confirm you write your book I did I had so much fun writing the book uh yeah about that one well so what do you know about calories very little yeah that's fine but tell me and tell me like the what I what I think they are um or just generally like it's a it's a thing yes Thermo I'm talking like a much simpler definition oh sure you can if you want cheese it's like a thermally clear reaction where a calorie is the measure of how much heat is required to break down a molecule of food that's really not bad thank you wow you really should give yourself more credit because when before we started you were like I know nothing about food and biochemistry actually you know some pretty good I know from just like doing this podcast yeah and it's yeah this is why I really do it because I'm very selfish reasons and I realize that it's helping a lot of other people that are also idiots um but but that's that's what I know from guests that I've sat here so that's my definition of a calorie fantastic so I think a lot of people will also stay like oh yeah calories are bad like I need to eat not too many calories otherwise bad stuff happens and I gain weight or whatever so I want you to know how calories were actually invented and measured because it is completely mind-boggling so the way that scientists first started measuring the calories in a food is the following okay so let's use our imagination here the scientists they took a box okay and they put a food in that box let's say that cookie they put the cookie in a box then they put this box with a cookie in it under I mean in another box that contains water so they submerged the cookie box in water okay and then somehow they light the cookie inside the small box on fire they burn the cookie and they measure by how many degrees the water the surrounding water increases in temperature that is how we measured calories literally measuring how much heat happens when we burn that food so as a result you might say okay well you know you might test a cookie in this setting
and you might test it against I don't know an avocado and you might see that the temperature in that big box Inc so increases by as many degrees for both the cookie and the avocado so you you know from a calorie perspective you'd say these two foods contain the same number of calories but that's a really reductive way of thinking about food it's almost like thinking these two books are both 500 pages therefore they're the same you see how that's a problem the number of pages in a book doesn't tell us anything about what the book is about who wrote it what are the words what's the message no clue the calories in a food also gives us no information about what's actually in the food how is that food going to impact how I feel my physical health my mental health my glucose levels so I want to teach people about the molecules in the food so they actually start recognizing like oh that food is going to make a spike that food is not and teaching them hacks so they can you know improve their health and so hack number three is called stop counting calories because essentially what I found is that if people just focus on balancing their glucose levels and using the hacks to do that and just completely stop counting calories their health improves significantly and it's a much nicer world to live in than a world of calorie counting because something else you should know two people can be eating the exact same number of calories let's say you know 2 000 calories a day but if one person is unique in a way that causes all these spikes and the other one isn't the spiky 2000 calorie person is going to be full of Cravings exhausted infamed aging faster not sleeping as well could have mental health issues could have PCOS yeah I could be gaining weight like it's not the same thing the calories are not really what matters we need to learn about how the food is actually affecting us interesting I find that so interesting because I was thinking as you were speaking you answered it there at the end that a lot of the reason why people do count
calories is for weight loss or weight you know gain reasons um but because of the glucose spikes in one set of 2000 calories one meal that will give me two thousand calories it'll have a significant impact on the insulin yeah levels and also on how you're feeling and how you're doing and how difficult you know that fat loss is or not how much of a good time you're having along the way hmm so that's the Nuance that really you know people use calorie counting as a tool I guess but that's the Nuance that's really missing if you really want to achieve any of those goals for whatever reason you have absolutely and then you know restricting calories of course like if you go from 2 000 calories to I don't know how many but fewer than that you're essentially reducing how much you're eating right so yes it's possible that'll lead to weight loss but like one um that's not really sustainable like do you really want to count calories for the rest of your life like that's just I don't know that feels really difficult to me um and second it doesn't tell you again like what you're eating so you're reducing quantity so yeah that can lead to consequences but it might not be improving your health at all you might be losing weight on your body but actually you know increasing the problems and the symptoms and the conditions so I really hope people stop counting calories and through this science just kind of learn how to approach the food landscape and how to approach food habits in a way that heals them from everything they want to heal from without the sort of calorie thing breakfast yeah what do you have for breakfast Stephen today yeah uh nothing yet today I I was going so I was actually I ordered food right to this this wonderful Studio here in London um at 10 30 a.m and it said it would take half an hour to get here and it got here when you arrived now I looked at it and I thought if I eat this then I'm gonna have some kind of like dump halfway through this conversation so it's just sat
can I ask what you ordered no okay because some foods some breakfast foods will have that impact and make you feel tired um so I ordered a breakfast wraps it's got like eggs avocados bacon in it and it's like a gluten-free wrap thing and I was looking at it thinking because of this bread I think the bread is probably going to make me have a dump and I don't ever want to have like a energy dump half with your comments I don't want to fall asleep you know that's rude there would be yeah Midway through the conversation so I've not eaten yet interesting coffee so actually you know New York first is is a pretty good one in terms of glucose so the main thing we want to do to study our glucose levels is have a Savory breakfast instead of a sweet one so we want to have a breakfast that contains protein you know like eggs fish meat protein powder maybe some fat like the avocado that's fantastic and maybe some Fiber if you want to add some veggies in there and then any sort of like bread or starches or potatoes should be there just for taste it should not be the centerpiece of the breakfast and then importantly for a Savory breakfast that keeps your glucose level steady we shouldn't eat anything sweet at all for breakfast except whole fruit if we want some what's the difference between whole fruit and whatever isn't whole fruit oh well you know as I explained like fruit has been bred by humans for a super long time to be extra sweet extra juicy so today when you look at an Apple for example it's really been pumped full of sweetness and sugar and made really easy to eat I had this conversation this week with my partner um she was offering me some fruit and because now I'm like a food you know arrogant little food guy because of all these conversations I've had I was like babe it's got sugar in it and they've bred it and and then she was like really and we've had a conversation about it and I Googled it and I said um I Googled like the historic banana apple yeah and the pear and I showed it she was like what because they obviously you know the fruit we have today is so bright and big absolutely and easy to
eat yeah yeah exactly you peel it but you know and then I showed her some of these pictures of these old bananas and they're like tiny and they're like full of seeds and stuff full of seeds and Tiny and actually quite tart yeah you wouldn't really eat that menu you wouldn't want to yeah and so even though fruit has been bred for a super long time to be extra sweet if you want to eat something sweet it's still the best thing to eat because of the fiber that fruit contains and as they explained you know fiber is protective in Whole Foods in whole fruit so now here's the thing while a piece of whole fruit is the best to eat if you want to eat something sweet the problem starts when we denature that piece of whole fruits when we blend it when we juice it when we dry it when we puree it so many different things so let's take for example when you juice a piece of fruit juicing is essentially taking away all the fiber getting getting rid of all the fiber the fiber is like the the hard stuff you know the the pulp and everything that's left over so if you juice like an apple you're just taking all the sugar from the Apple putting it in water and getting rid of all the protective fiber so all of that super concentrated sugar that's been bred into that piece of fruit you're not giving to your body in a really really fast way and as I explained the speed of delivery is really important the faster all that Sugar arrives the more your mitochondria get hurt the more the spikes are happening inflammation Etc and so when you drink apple juice you're essentially drinking like the amount of sugar in two already pretty bread apples and drinking it in a few seconds and so your body is experiencing a massive Spike and your body doesn't care whether the sugar cup came from a piece of fruit or if it came from like cane sugar and is in a can of Coca-Cola the molecules in the apple juice and in the can of Coke are the same your body does not make a difference your body's not like oh this sugar came from fruits not going to cause any issues oh this sugar is from Coca-Cola oh it's going to cause problems your body does not care and in a can of fruit juice there's almost much sugar as in a can of Coca-Cola so when we eat fruit juice we have to do it in a way that's like okay this is
dessert right this is for my pleasure this is not for my health this is gonna give me pleasure and make maybe make me feel a bit happy but it's not going to help my body which one of these bastards told me that fruit juice was good for me I've been drinking this stuff like I was me too you know you're growing up if I went and had fruit juice I was like Well Done Steve yeah you know you've done yourself you've done future Steve a massive service there and then I got to [ __ ] 30 years old and people start telling me that fruit juices um bad for me like who who lied to me do you want to know who lies who the people who make fruit juice yeah I thought it would be that yeah and same for me you know I grew up eating drinking orange juice and a Nutella crepe every morning come on you knew the Nutella crepe wasn't good for you I mean yeah but like you know I was like I'm having orange juice so it balances it out you know I had no idea that it was just eating starches and sugars just eating a massive glucose bike for breakfast and when you create a big glucose bike at breakfast your entire day then becomes completely like a glucose roller coaster the breakfast Spike really dictates how you're going to be doing for the rest of the day so what is a whole fruit a whole first is like a piece of fruit that is just oh you think just like not processed okay yeah like like something you can hold in your hands that you can buy the supermarket like an untouched from the tree okay I thought it's not a certain type of fruit it's just you're talking about the state of the fruit yeah okay what would be a better word for whole no I guess that is the word I'm just an idiot like um uh uh a piece of I don't know hole is probably the right word okay yeah okay so I'm not gonna have any so granola I used to think granola was I was like again doing my health service by eating granola so listen if you're having a great time no symptoms feeling amazing top energy no Cravings no hormonal issues no skins Superman yeah like if you're doing fine and you're eating things that are sweet and you're having a great time I have nothing to teach you but if you're
suffering in one way or another many of the symptoms we talked about earlier look at your breakfast and avoid the sweet stuff so avoid the granolas and the breakfast cereals and the oats with banana and honey in them switch to something Savory and I have lots of examples of what's a Savory breakfast in my books but that is really going to help set your day on a much better path and gonna help your physical and mental health Thrive you have these 10 hacks in your book and um there was one in particular that I you know there was none of them that I thought I can do this and then there was this other one where I was like let me guess which one do you think it is um I actually I would say the vinegar one is such a weirdo how did you why did you I'm actually drinking vinegar before I eat can you imagine can you imagine me going to a restaurant could I just get a glass of vinegar please before I well actually it's happening more and more Steven why are people doing this to themselves okay because okay by the way I can by the way the hacks are there for people to pick and choose from okay you're supposed to like compose with them as you wish it's not you don't have to do everything all the time you don't have to do any of them if you don't want to it's like information from the science and then you decide what you do with it hack seven drink vinegar before you eat yeah so the scientific studies show us that if we have one tablespoon of vinegar in a tall glass of water so this is a pretty this is a pretty good size one tablespoon of vinegar in a tall glass of water before a meal can reduce the glucose Spike of the meal by up to 30 and the insulin Spike by up to 20 which is important because you know insulin is also something we want to manage and you might be wondering like how the heck does that work well vinegar contains another cool molecule called acetic acid and acetic acid does two main things that help our glucose levels number one you know how I explained that starches they break down into glucose when you digest them while acetic acid slows down that process so it slows down how quickly for example a piece of bread is
going to break down into individual molecules so it slows down how quickly the molecules of glucose arrive in your bloodstream which is again what we want we want to slow down the velocity and second acetic acid goes to your muscles and it tells your muscles to soak up glucose as it arrives into your body so glucose arrives more slowly in the bloodstream and muscles soak it up as it gets there so those two actions reduce the spike of the meal without you needing to change any part of that meal so if you want to have that cookie and you want it to have the cookie without setting off a glucose roller coaster without setting off that sugar addiction having a vinegar drink before would be a really good idea I'll think about it um moving on hack eight after you eat move people say this you know they go for walks and stuff after like the Christmas meal or whatever but why why is that from a scientific perspective important it's interesting because it's been around culturally for a very long time right like the post-meal walk Etc even the veggie starter I mean in France we you know we have this thing called kurite which is raw veggies at the beginning of a meal we've had it for forever you know just culturally in Italy antipasti veggies first Etc so it's cool to see that a lot of these hacks have been around for a very long time but now we understand how they work and so we're able to be like oh I want that back in my life so moving after eating so your muscles when they contract they need energy to do so and the first place they look for this energy is in the glucose in your bloodstream so we can use that to our advantage the more muscle is Contracting the more glucose it needs so if we use our muscles for 10 minutes after a meal some of the glucose from that meal will make its way to your muscles instead of just standing there and creating a spike and so you can use your muscles in lots of different ways you can go for a walk you can clean your apartment you can play with your dog you can go to the gym and you can do my new favorite thing which is let's do it together Stephen so put your feet on the ground yeah and do some calf raises do you know what that is you just like go into your tippy toes
and back down calf raises and you feel your calf Contracting yeah so this is actually a really effective way to get your muscles to soak up glucose because there's a muscle in your calf called the soleus muscle which is really extra good at soaking up glucose so for example after a meal you're at work you're at your desk you want to reduce the spike do some calf raises like this nobody will see and you'll be helping me because that won't come so weird they're going to see me have this shot of vinegar and then sit here like I'm like I'm like there's something yeah but then they're gonna be like damn Stephen is doing so great look he's 65 and still kayaking like then they might think they should have done the same it's a good trade-off I'm happy to take the weirdness um that's really interesting because when I think about glucose spikes and movement and stuff and what you've just said there with my mind went straight to being sat on a plane which I do a lot of and they bring the food down they bring the dessert trolley down or whatever and then you you eat the not me of course but someone else a friend of mine he ate the cookie on the dessert trolley and then he sat there for 10 hours because he was on a plane yeah yeah that sounds like a [ __ ] nightmare well for your glucose is not great but there's lots of things you can do so first don't have the cookie on an empty stomach have it after some other food for example maybe you bought like some nuts at their airport I have some of those nuts before the cookie That's What I Call putting clothing on your carbs and then you can do some calf raises in a plane right sure vinegar you can do the vinegar don't do it as a shot make sure you dilutes it it's better for your teeth okay okay generally do you have a like a hypothesis or an idea or a system for when you travel and what you eat yes if I'm traveling I always make sure I have a really really good Savory breakfast even if I'm not hungry before I leave for the plane so I have like my favorite like two egg omelet with feta and tomatoes it's my favorite thing to make what is your general what is your general walk me through your food you know I I was watching your um some of
your interviews and the most replayed part of one of your interviews was you describing what you ate no way yes it was it was an hour and a half long interview and at the very very end of it the interviewer asked you what you ate on a daily basis and that was the highest Spike oh in the in the replay time so I thought you know for clearly that's what people want to know at home right now so in in a in an idyllic okay Jessie day okay so my favorite two egg omelets for breakfast give me timings as well oh wow I mean that depends I really my days changed so much um I don't know like on an idyllic Day based on the science if you were being Superwoman get shot in the dark here um okay wake up at 7 45 have breakfast at 8 15. two egg omelets with feta and tomatoes and then that makes me feel pretty good and full into lunch at lunch I usually will have like a big ass salad so like maybe some spinach quinoa everything mixed together I put some vinegar dressing in there to reduce the spike um salmon avocado cheese like a nice big like yummy thing then inevitably inevitably in the afternoon I want to eat something sweet because I I love sugar like that's the thing you have to understand like I love sweet foods and that's one of the reasons that I figured out all these hacks because I was like I need to reduce my spikes because I want my mental health to improve but I don't want to give up my chocolate cake like that's just not happening so anyway enough to be in the afternoon I'm like time for some sweet Foods so I'll do lots of hacks around that I'll do the vinegar hack before the chocolate cake I'll also do another hack we haven't spoken about yet called putting clothing on your carbs and so that means when you're eating starches and sugars add some protein fat or Fiber to them so for example I have the chocolate cake with some Greek yogurt which is actually a freaking delicious combo as well so I'll do that and then I'll go for a walk or I'll go to the gym I'll use my muscles so I'm getting all the pleasure from the cake with less of an impact and then in the evening is usually when I have more
time to have like a more like longer meal so I'll do veggie starter some nice whatever proteins and pasta afterwards and then usually I don't really want anything sweet to add after dinner because I've had the sweet thing in the afternoon that would be my you know Common food habits then today for example I woke up at 5 45 because I had this shoot to go to in the morning before coming here and so I just grabbed some ham from my fridge and I have it in my bag now and I just started munching on some ham in the morning because again a protein Centric breakfast is really key to making sure you have lots of energy all day and I wanted to come here and have a lot of energy you know so I was like I need to be really good about my Savory breakfast today so I just had that so going back then to my breakfast today yeah ahead of doing this podcast you know these podcasts sometimes last you know two hours three hours whatever it might be what should I be eating in your view to stay high energy to stay focused etc etc and what should I not be eating so you should definitely avoid granola okay anything sweet right you want to think about okay protein at breakfast so actually your breakfast wrap was pretty good I would say because it has eggs it has avocado it has you know some fats some protein that's pretty pretty good and as long as the wrap is not like a huge amount of bread you're fine because it's fine to have bread or starches in the morning for taste so to me that would feel like a really good really good option and if you do get tired after eating something like that maybe you're having a bit too much food that can also be a thing um some of you have half and you should feel pretty good okay that's good to know I always wonder and then you know a lot of people they're sad to give up their sweet breakfast foods and here's another hack you can use it's you can still have that sugar but have it as dessert after lunch or after dinner instead of like in the morning on an empty stomach so it's not about cutting anything out it's about learning to place the foods and organize them in a way that keeps your glucose levels steady so that you don't kick off
the Cravings roller coaster where you feel so controlled by all the sugar and the food around you you're very very good at simplifying things but also making them like both accessible and not intimidating and that word intimidating is one that I've I've come to learn is quite prevalent when people are listening to food conversations they feel like oh my God it's a lot and it because there's so much they don't really take anything simple and actionable into their lives yeah so if you were to try and summarize the message you're trying to spread into maybe like a sentence or two that someone can Embrace as a philosophy fee for their dietary choices and their eating habits what what exactly would that be I think it would be learn the glucose hacks and then just eat everything you love these hacks I hope they become and this is kind of my mission I hope they become as well known as drink water brush your teeth that's kind of the vibe I'm going for these are fundamental scientific principles that can really help you break free and Fast Track you to feeling so so much better and they will help you cut through all the noise in the marketing Etc because it's really about how your body functions in like a biochemical level so sorry that was more than one sentence but that's got it and how are you feeling now you've obviously been on a health journey of your own but where did you find yourself today man I am so grateful today because for example you know I'm on this trip now and I'm staying in an Airbnb by myself for 10 days like I'm yeah like I'm alone and back in the day you know when I was 99 I broke my back I couldn't spend 20 minutes alone I would have a panic attack I am so happy of that Journey but I really don't wish it on anyone like it was freaking horrible but now I'm like oh like I did it I healed I went through this stuff I understand my body and now I just want to make sure that I share this information with as many people as I possibly can um and that's what really excites me so I'm doing very well thank you for asking Stephen are there any sort of misconceptions about food or you know glucose or Diet dietary behaviors that
we we might have missed today I want to make sure we've really covered it off you know yeah is there anything that you think we might have missed so we talked about calories which is really important we talked about fruit well another thing we can talk about which is a common myth is that sugar for breakfast gives you energy we kind of covered it in many different ways but I want people to understand sugar gives you pleasure it does not give you energy it is not good for your energy levels oh yeah that's what's really that's a paradigm shift for me because I I would have thought that having something sugary before doing like this podcast yeah would make me like that's not energy that's dopamine okay and even though it feels good for a little while then you crash and then you want more it's actually not unlocking like deep biological energy and stamina it's just making you and by the way sometimes you want that like if you're writing something and you're just like I need some just to eat that cooking you know sometimes we need to use it to our advantage that dopamine hits but long term it's not what's going to be helpful for you and if you did that thing every time you recorded a podcast after a few months you feel really chronically tired and you'll be like okay this is not working anymore because your mitochondria would have suffered so much on the inside I have this box in front of me on the front of it it says the Diary of a SEO conversation cards I'm so excited on the back it says vulnerability is the daughter connection this is a new tradition we've taken all of the questions that were ever written in the Diary of a CEO and would turn them into these cards and on the front of the card you can see a question like this written by the person and then it says the name of the person that wrote it and on the back you can see the person that answered it if you scan this QR code these are available at thediary.com I need to get this this is very cool we the the reason why we've done this is because you know I've come to notice and learn that there's a certain type of question you can ask somebody and if you have the you know the patience to let them speak um that unlocks a level of vulnerability
which is connective for humans so that's why it says vulnerability is the door to connection because after I do these podcast conversations with people especially when we're talking about like real life story-centric stuff I just feel so connected to them like we become like best friends in two hours and then we have an ongoing relationship and I have that with nearly all of the guests that have been on this podcast that have really opened up with me so we want people to be able to do that at home I have four cards here that I've picked from the the deck I think there's about 60 or 70 cards in the in the full deck which is available online um and I pick four here so I'm going to slide these over to you so excited why why are you so excited well my question's not exciting no but they were but like I love this kind of stuff I love the vulnerable questions I love I just I love this okay for that reason I'm gonna ask you to pick two okay if you regret that decision no I won't okay I'm gonna slide them over okay so I look at them all no no no no no oh oh okay I don't choose no no okay I'm gonna pick the two middle ones okay and I read them please read them and say who uh wrote The question as well what is one thing you regret not saying to somebody and why didn't you say it he wrote that question Nick Jones he's the founder of her house yeah this is an interesting one that's coming to me and I still have time to say it so that's good I wish I had spent more time talking to the surgeon that operated on me and I wish I had thanked him for first of all like how great of a job he did on me but also just how much love and care he put into my scars they're really thin and beautiful and they were sewn like from the inside and in the side scar that's gonna make me cry it was really sweet because it's a side scarf he put it just in like the crease of my waist you know touched that and he did and so I guess I could write him a letter but um and that's something that I have
every day in my body you know and just it was really cool he did that so I'm gonna write him a letter this doesn't make me want to do it because he's still around and alive so I love it so yeah not too late okay second question tell me something you have never told anyone before Oh my God I'm such an open book it's tough um something I've never told anyone before um interesting let me think of this one Gary Neville asked this question is that how you say his name yeah well yesterday I spoke to my dad on the phone and you seemed sad hmm and I mean that made me sad and I just want him to be happy that's all I can think of you sounded sad yeah yeah he doesn't talk a lot about his feelings and I could just tell that he was sad how could you tell um I think it's in the tone of The Voice you know and he was in Paris and he thought I was there too and so he wanted to see me and I was like oh I'm not in Paris right now and I could just tell that he would have really liked to see me and so that made me sad that I was you know not there you have a suspicion why he's sad don't you like a deeper suspicion yeah I think life is a little bit rough on him right now and um I think a combination of lots of stuff I'm not sure like nothing acute more like a chronic like kind of uh kind of feeling and um I just wish I could like wave a magic wand and make sure everybody I love is happy all the time but a lot of people struggle with that especially with their parents you almost see like a decaying in their energy and joy for life and it's slow yeah and it's like almost quite chronic isn't it like a lot of the subject matter we've talked about today like inflammation it's almost like a psychological inflammation that when you you know they get to a
certain stage sometimes it happens earlier but you almost see a you know people characterize it as being like grumpy old you know oh yes or like sad old whatever I wonder what that is I wonder what's what the like psychological nutrient that's missing is it connection is it a sense of purpose is it I mean it has to be said it's not everybody but there is um I'm not sure I think it's also like a the unexamined aspect of life you know I feel like if you've gone to therapy and you've done work you kind of have tools to like you know change the things you want to change in your life and put boundaries and like do things and I think a lot of people um don't have really those tools yet and but in the same way that they don't have the tools around food and how to just make themselves feel better um I think it's um to me it feels like a tool thing I don't know maybe it's just because you know that's my own experience of things but I think those tools are most absent in men yeah typically you know those tools about expression and opening up and vulnerability and it's much of the reason why I love doing this so much yeah because we get to have these kinds of conversations and they are medicinal in many many ways you know and these cars are really wonderful because I feel like even if you're somebody who doesn't tend to open up very much like the fact that the card is asking the question makes it totally it was random as well you picked it it wasn't me so yeah but just generally like I think everybody should play this it's so important because it's really hard to ask these questions and it's really hard for people to take them seriously and be like I'm actually going to answer this but the card medium and especially it's so beautiful the handwriting I love it it's really lovely idea uh it was quite interesting I was just thinking when you said that the reason why it's different from me just asking you those questions versus you selecting one and it being on this sort of Middle Ground enamel object is because it removes the agenda yeah from the question exactly you know what I mean it doesn't come with an agenda yeah
so it's almost like you asked yourself it right we do have another the old tradition which was asking you the question yes in the book do it do it I'm ready okay this is a tough one oh yeah um [Music] do it Stephen you have my permission okay the person you cherish most in life dies tomorrow you have a 60-second phone call with them what do you tell them well the good news is I communicate a lot I would say my mom to be honest just you know thank you guys happily I would say listen it was amazing thank you I feel like I told you everything and you know how I feel about you and um it's really sad but it would be sad if it weren't sad thank you Jesse thank you amazing conversation you're an amazing person and the work you're doing is so incredibly necessary because it's turning the lights on to something that is um driving us very much from the back room in terms of our health outcomes that most of us don't know anything about I've been trying to be healthy I've had I've had the intention but because of the lack of information um I've been failing without knowing it yeah and it's the motivation thing as well it's like how do you make it easy enough that you can actually start today amen thank you so much Jesse everybody can go find your work everyone will be able to find you on the internet um they call you the glucose goddess you very much are goddess and your book um about the glucose Revolution is a must must read for anybody that's listening to this so I hope everybody goes and gets that book because I'll be honest I'm gonna be completely honest with you here it's important I thought the subject matter if glucose was [ __ ] boring until I read your book nice and then I was like oh my God yeah you know and I think I think a lot people who are in the camp
I was in will probably feel the same way so take my word for it it's an incredible book and it's a must read book Thank You Stephen and I have a new book because goddess method that just came out and where what is the I've not read that one what's the distinction between the two so glucose Revolution is like the everything all the science the stories the backstory the glucose goddess method is a four-week guide to actually get started oh like the actionable yeah it's like okay week one breakfast here are all the recipes you can use week two vinegar here's what you do week three veggie starters so it's an even it's yet another layer of help to actually help you start today incredible that's what I need to read next yeah that's what I'll do thank you so much Jesse's oh no no thank you Stephen over the last couple of how long maybe four months I've been changing my diet shall I say many of you have really been paying attention to this podcast will know why I've sat here with some incredible Health experts and one of the things that's really come through for me which has caused a big change in my life is the need for us to have these superfoods these green Foods these vegetables and then a company I love so much and a company I'm an investor in and then a company that sponsored this podcast and I'm on the board of recently announced a new product which absolutely spoke to exactly where I was in my life and that is huel and they announced Daily Greens Daily Greens is a product that contains 91 superfoods nutrients and plant-based ingredients which helps me meet that dietary requirement with the convenience that hewell always offers unfortunately it's only currently available in the US but I hope I pray that it'll be with you guys in the UK too so if you're in the US check it out it's an incredible product I've been having it here in La for the last couple of weeks and it's a game changer foreign [Music]