You're telling me that that will have an impact?

Absolutely, and the studies prove it. It's an amazing ingredient that's been used for its health benefits. For example, it has impact on visceral fat.

Is that belly fat?

Yeah, it's the fat that's really bad for you. Yeah. You're not supposed to do that. Stephen.

Oh, gosh. The glucose goddess is back. Jessie Inchauspe is a biochemist and bestselling author with a focus on nutrition and glucose management.

She provides simple science backed tips to improve our health. 80% of the population have glucose spikes every single day, and thats when problems start happening. From mental health to acne, to faster aging, infertility and pcos, which is one of the leading causes of infertility in women. And the problem is, were in a situation where the food landscape is so toxic and most of us just eat sugar and starches, but theyre literally made up of glucose molecules.

Is there any such thing as good sugar?

No. So even all the fruit that we find today in supermarkets is not natural. Some people believe that if the sugar is coming from a fruit, for example, in a fruit smoothie, good sugar, but that's a total lie. And your body doesn't differentiate whether the sugar is in a fruit smoothie or the sugar is in a chocolate cake.

Are there any foods that have surprised you when you tested them?

Yes, I think the biggest ones are.

Wow. This begs the question then, is there a healthy way to consume sugar?

So these are four hacks that people can implement in their lives. And you're able to reduce your glucose spikes while still eating what you love.

And you took these hacks and did an experiment?

Yes. And 90% of people reduce their cravings. Really significant impacts on sleep, hormones, mood on diabetes.

And it says roughly 40% people who wanted to lose weight did in fact lose weight.

Yep.

So what are the hacks?

The first one is.

Jesse inchaspe, the glucose goddess. We spoke two years ago, and in that time, I feel like there's been a real glucose revolution, much of which has been led by you. Your books have sold millions and millions and millions of copies around the world. Your conversations online have millions and millions and millions and millions of views. More than I could possibly count. What's going on with glucose?

The thing is, glucose has always been incredibly important to our health, but it's been going on behind the scenes. But now, with the technology that we have, glucose monitors new science. We're actually able to get a real good handle on it and understand our diet through that lens. So most of us, Steven, have unhealthy glucose levels. To give you an example, 1 billion people in the world have either type two diabetes or prediabetes. 1 billion. And that number is increasing every single day. And then in people who don't have any health issues, up to 80% of the population still has glucose spikes every single day. And this leads to lots of symptoms, from mental health problems to fertility to acne, to faster aging. Glucose is really important, and I'm really happy that we're talking about it more.

Have you been surprised by how much people have woken up to glucose? Sugar?

Yeah, definitely. I think even the word glucose people used to know blood sugar, but now the fact that people know what glucose is makes me quite happy. That's the scientific way to refer to blood sugar. It's surprising. But the thing is, I'm on the inside. I'm working every single day to make sure people know what glucose is. So it's like, you know when you put the frog in the water and then you slowly boil the water? You know that image? And the frog doesn't notice the water is boiling? That's how I feel, because I've been doing this for five years now. So I can tell now if I compare today to five years ago, there's been a huge shift. But I've been looking at it every single day, day by day, and the increase has been very gradual.

How do you define yourself? There's this sort of name you go under, the glucose goddess. But professionally, if someone says, what do you do? How do you define that?

I say, I'm a biochemist. I'm a biochemist passionate about sharing science in a fun, accessible, sexy way. That's what I like to do.

These cgms, continuous glucose monitors that everybody seems to be wearing these days. They're much of the reason people, I guess, know you because you post these incredible graphs on your instagram showing the impact of the things we eat on our glucose levels. I want to start there. When I eat something sweet and full of sugar, there's a spike in my CGM. So my continuous glucose monitor. Does the spike mean that something bad is going on in my body?

Kind of, yeah. So I'll go just one step back. There's lots of different categories of foods, but there are two that impact our blood sugar levels. It's starches. So that's bread, rice, pasta, potatoes, oats, and sugars. So anything sweet, from an apple pie to an orange juice. These two categories of foods, they're literally made up of glucose molecules. So when you eat them, they break down into individual glucose molecules, and the glucose molecules arrive into your blood. If you eat a lot of starches and sugars at once, a lot of glucose molecules are arriving into your blood. And that's what you see. That's the spike you see on your glucose monitor. Now, these spikes have a few different consequences. Having a few spikes here and there is not a big deal. But if you have really big spikes, which I think most of us are discovering we have, even if we don't have diabetes, that's when problems start happening. There's basically three processes that take place in your body when you spike. It's chronic fatigue of your mitochondria, aging, glycation, and then insulin release. And I can go into detail into these, but these are what underpin all the negative consequences of glucose spikes.

So start with that first one, the mitochondria.

So there's these little factories in your cells that are in charge of making energy. You must have learned this at school. You know, the mitochondria is the factory of the cell. These little mitochondria are constantly trying to make energy for your body, and they turn glucose into energy. So you give them glucose through food, they turn it into energy, and then your brain uses the energy, your heart to pump, your ears to listen, your eyes to see. Your whole body uses this energy. And so you might think, okay, I want lots of energy, so I should give my mitochondria lots of glucose. That's the logical conclusion you might come to, but that's where it completely collapses. See, biology is a bit weird. Take the example of a plant. Do you have any plants at home?

I do, yeah.

Okay. Are you able to keep them alive?

My cleaner does a great job of keeping all of them alive.

I have a super hard time, but the reason I'm bringing up plants is because you know that plants need some water to live. But if you give them too much water, they drown and they die. The human body is kind of the same. Some glucose, amazing, steady energy, too much glucose, and your little mitochondria start freaking out. They get overwhelmed by too much glucose arriving their way. They kind of go on strike, and I'm french, so I know, but they sort of go on strike, and they get overwhelmed and stressed out, and they're not able to make energy effectively anymore because we're overloading them with too much glucose to process. And as a human, what do you feel? You feel chronic fatigue. You wake up, you're exhausted, thinking of going to the grocery store or picking up your kids is super tiring. There's this energy system in your body is just kind of broken, but you keep eating carbs, you know, croissant, some bread, something sweet, but you keep being more and more tired. That's your mitochondria dysfunctioning. So that's the first thing that happens when you spike. You get tired. Your mitochondria gets stressed out.

And one thing that's interesting is that sometimes when we eat something sweet, especially in the morning, like an orange juice, we kind of feel a sense of a rush of energy. You know, you have a big glass of orange juice, and you sort of perk up for a sec. Most people think that that is energy. What's actually going on is that sugar releases dopamine in the brain, and it's the pleasure molecule. It's the same molecule that gets released when you have sex, when you play video games, when you do illegal drugs, sugar releases dopamine. It's pleasure. It makes you kind of feel awake, just briefly, but actually, that's not energy, because on the inside, your mitochondria are being damaged. So we're being tricked by sugary foods. And when we're tired, we often reach for something sugary to perk us up, but it doesn't work on the inside. So that's the first thing. Your mitochondria gets stressed out. And as your mitochondria get stressed out, they also release what's called free radicals, which is something that increases inflammation in the body. And inflammation is really nasty thing. We'll get to in a sec. The second thing that happens when you spike has to do with a chicken cooking in the oven.

So if you put. You're looking at me weird, but let me explain. If you put a chicken in the oven, it goes from pink to brown, right? You've seen this. It cooks. This process of cooking is called glycation. It's the process of browning or of cooking. Same thing when you toast a piece of toast, for example. The interesting thing is, a human being, from the moment we're born, we're slowly cooking in that same way on the inside. We're slowly glycating, we're slowly browning, and then when we're fully glycated, when we're fully cooked, we die. That's why when you look at the cartilage of babies, it's white. And if you look at the cartilage of somebody who's 90 years old, it's brown. They've cooked on the inside, and every glucose spike increases. You're looking at your skin. We'd have to open you up and look at your cartilage color. And every glucose spike increases its process of glycation. So much so that glucose and glycation, they kind of sound like a similar word, glucose glycation. It's because it's glucose doing the glycating. So every glucose spike increases. Glycation increases. Cooking accelerates aging. And this shows on your skin.

You get wrinkles faster if you glycate more. And also on the inside, your organs slowly get damaged. So glucose spikes, mitochondria get tired. You age faster. In response to this, your body knows, Stephen, that a big glucose spike is not good for you. Your body knows that it has to do something to try to get that glucose level down. So what it does, it calls up your pancreas, and it's like, yo, pancreas, we got a glucose spike going on. We need to get this glucose down. In response, your pancreas sends a hormone called insulin out in your body. You've heard of insulin before, right? And insulin's job, and we love her, her job is to grab all these excess glucose molecules and to store them away so they don't damage your body anymore. And insulin stores glucose away into your liver, into your muscles, and then when those are full, insulin stores glucose away into your fat cells. And that's one of the ways that you gain fat on your body. It's in response to the spikes and your body trying to protect you from the spikes. The problem is, insulin itself has consequences and is the driver of type two diabetes and insulin resistance.

So, to answer your question, yes. When you see a big spike on your glucose monitor, there's some of that going on. And the more spikes you have, the harder it is going to be for your body to manage your spikes. So it kind of becomes a vicious cycle. If you keep eating the same way, your spikes will get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger over time, with more and more damage.

On that last point about where insulin stores the excess glucose, does that mean that if I have more muscle mass, I'm better at eating sugary products?

Yep. And that's why, if you really love cookies, the best time to eat them is right after you work out, right before you work out, because your muscles are really hungry for glucose all the time. And the bigger your muscles are, the more you use them, the more they're going to capture some of that glucose for energy.

Okay? So me and my partner, we both go to the gym. She is significantly smaller than me in every way. She's short, she's lean, I'm bigger than her. I have more muscle mass. That means that if I have one cookie and she has the exact same cookie, then her glucose response is going to be potentially significantly different to mine.

Yes, potentially. So if you just look at muscle mass, since you have more muscle mass, you'll be able to handle that cookie better. But there are so many things that influence glucose response. For example, your level of hydration, how stressed you are, your microbiome, your genetics, what time of the month you're in when you're a female, how well you slept last night. I mean, there's a few factors. So if you were just to compare your spike to hers, you couldn't really draw any conclusions because there's so many confounding variables.

Those confounding variables give me a window into some of them and why they matter and how they have an impact on my glucose response.

So I think muscles is a really good example, right? If two people eat the same exact cookie, the person with more muscle mass is going to potentially see a smaller glucose spike because our muscles are going to absorb more of that glucose and faster. If you look at genetics, some people are better at growing their fat cells and at growing the number and the size of their fat cells, so they have a bigger reservoir to put glucose in. People of south asian descent, for example, they tend to have a harder time putting on fat cells, and as a result, their glucose spikes tend to be bigger because they don't have that storage unit that they can access and increase the size of. Does that make sense? Yeah.

Yeah. Are there any foods that you have been surprised at when you've tested them? Because this is one of the really shocking things that I discovered when I wore a continuous glucose monitor, is I would eat some things that I've been eating for a long, long time, and they would cause a spike. And I was like, what? I thought that was healthy. Yeah, but what are those things?

I guess for the surprising one.

The surprising ones, not just for you, but for people that message you and go, oh, my God, Jesse, I've been lied to about my tomato ketchup or.

Okay, I think the biggest ones are honey and grapes. So grapes first. You think it's a fruit. It's healthy, it's natural, it's good for me, right? Well, actually, all the fruit that we find today in supermarkets is not natural. It is the product of human breeding for thousands and thousands of years to make them extra sweet, extra juicy in the same way that humans have been breeding dogs from the time of the gray wolves into chihuahuas and golden retrievers. These are not natural types of dogs. We've bred wolves into these dogs. Fruit is the same thing. We've bred pieces of fruit to make these beautiful grapes without any seeds and just this little pocket of sugar. And so a grape, when you look at it, actually, it's just a big dose of sugar. It's in the fruit format, so people think it's good for them. But actually when it comes to your glucose levels, it's just big glucose spike. So those are really surprising. All fruits, it varies, right? So for example, berries are lower in sugar, so create a smaller spike. But any tropical fruit, like bananas, mangoes, papayas, and then grapes also, those are really high in sugar.

Yeah, but the thing is, you know, a piece of whole fruit is okay because it has fiber in it. The real problem comes when you denature that piece of fruit and you turn it into a juice, for example, because then you're removing that protective fiber and just extracting the water and the sugar.

Yeah. I've not drank a glass of juice since starting this podcast, because some people I've spoken to have told me that it's just like drinking sugar water.

Yeah, it's just like drinking a can of coke. But people think, well, it comes from a piece of fruit, so it's natural. Orange juice comes from oranges, therefore it's good for you because it's natural. What they don't realize is that the sugar in a can of soda is also natural. It comes from sugar beets or canes. So if you're really looking at the source of the sugar, you realize it doesn't matter at all. They all come from plants. What matters is the concentration and the medium that the sugar is in.

I understand grapes causing a glucose spike because when I taste it, it tastes sweet. But there's some things that I eat that don't taste sweet that cause a glucose spike, and those are the things that I think lie to me.

Like bread.

Like bread. Like rice.

Yeah. Well, the thing is, glucose is actually not sweet. What you're tasting in fruit is fructose. So let me explain. So, starches, like bread, pasta, rice, potatoes, oats, those are starches. Those are literally millions of glucose molecules just attached hand to hand like this. That's a starch. It's just a long chain of glucose. When you eat the starch, poof, it turns into individual glucose molecules, raises your blood sugar, even though it doesn't taste sweet in a piece of fruit or in sugar. You're not eating starch. What you're eating is sucrose, a different kind of molecule, which is half glucose, half fructose. Yeah. So when it breaks down, it gives you glucose and a spike, but also fructose that tastes really sweet, but doesn't raise your blood sugar levels that much.

So, on the other side of the coin, then, are there foods that taste sweet, but don't have an impact on my glucose?

Yes, sweeteners, stevia, aspartame, things like that.

So you're saying that I should put sweeteners in my food as opposed to sugar?

Well, I think people need to realize that even though sweeteners are not super good for us. Right? Of course, it's better to drink water than a diet soda. The diet soda is better for you than the regular can of soda with the 30 grams of real sugar in there. I personally would never have a can of real soda. I would always have the diet soda. Always, always, always. Because those sweeteners don't raise your blood sugar levels. Okay? They don't create that big spike and that big insulin spike, and then the drop.

Is there such a good thing as good sugar? Is there any such thing as good sugar?

No. People often believe that if the sugar is coming from a fruit and is, for example, in a fruit smoothie that they might have in the morning, that's good sugar. But that sugar that's in a cake is bad sugar. So people tend to compare these two and say, oh, well, I'm having a fruit smoothie. That's good for me, but, oh, that chocolate cake would be bad for me. That's a total lie. It's all the same molecules. The molecules in that fruit smoothie and the molecules in that chocolate cake are the same. It's sucrose, it's the same stuff. And your body doesn't differentiate whether the sugar is in a fruit smoothie or the sugar is in a chocolate cake. So all sugar is the same. Even, you know, honey, agave, maple syrup, all these things that have these health halos, because of marketing, it's all the same molecules. So I recommend that people just have the sugar that they like best. Don't think that one is going to be better for you than the other. And have all sugar as dessert. So that fruit smoothie, that's also dessert. It's not super healthy because it comes from fruits.

It's just like the chocolate cake.

And is there such a thing as good sweeteners and bad sweeteners?

Yeah, so there's a few categories. So the ones that seem to be really fine for us are stevia, monk fruit and allulose. The ones that have been linked to quite a few health issues are aspartame, maltitol, sucralose. So for example, aspartame, you usually find it in soda, whereas stevia, you might buy a little packet at home and put it in your tea. That being said, the spartan is still better for you than the real can of coke with a 30 grams of real sugar.

So stevia is something that I shouldn't be?

No, stevia is good. Yeah, you shouldn't. Do you use stevia?

I didn't put any sweeteners in anything. I didn't put sugar in anything either, so I'm trying to stay away from coffee. It's just black coffee.

You don't even eat chocolate.

Of course I. Chocolate, maybe not so much, maybe that's not my thing.

But what's your sweet thing?

Carrot cake. What's your sweet thing?

Oh, chocolate. I love chocolate. Like, my favorite is chocolate ice cream with a chocolate brownie and chocolate sauce and chocolate sprinkles. Anything chocolate.

That's not very glucose goddess.

Well, here's where you're wrong, Stephen. I'm actually not anti sugar.

What are you talking about?

No, I love sugar. I eat sugary carbs all the time. But I want people to know what I know, which is how and when to eat those things.

That's the end of the podcast.

Thank you so much.

It's really great to see you again.

Seriously, we need to learn how to eat these things because they're so delicious in a way that's less bad for our health. It's not about cutting them out. That would be a diet. I'm not pro diets, I'm pro knowledge. And I want to make sure people are not having sugar and dessert for breakfast. You know, sweet cereal in the morning and orange juice, that's dessert. Anyway, I'm all about just trying to empower people with the information so they don't get trapped by these marketing lies.

Are we meant to be eating the amounts of sugar that we eat, though? Are we meant to be eating any sugar? What does our sort of evolutionary history tell us about our relationship with glucose?

I think fruit is something we're meant to be eating, but the fruit that used to exist was less sweet and harder to digest and more fibrous. And then in terms of starches, starches are totally fine to eat. The problem is, today most of us just eat sugar and starches. We've completely lost touch with the nice proteins and the organ meats and the fiber and the healthy fats. We're in a situation where the food landscape is so toxic and it's so just starches and sugars that people are getting sicker and sicker and sicker, and it's addictive and it's cheap. So we're in a very difficult situation. And that's the situation that, you know, the GLp ones are trying to solve. We're in a pickle. We are in a pickle.

Are you optimistic about the pickle we're in as it relates to sugar and precursors?

I have to say yes, because the amount of transformations I see in my readers is really encouraging. You know, people are reclaiming their health, getting power over it, understanding food again. But we've got a lot of work to do, and I can do my work educating people from the ground up on these hacks. But we also need, like, systemic change. We need policy, we need governments to get involved, and we need to find ways to make healthier food because we're just killing the population right now. It's really terrible.

So talking about some of the consequences of a high glucose diet, one of them, you mentioned earlier when we were talking about glycation, is aging. Has anyone ever done any research to prove that a high glucose diet is associated or correlated with increased or accelerated aging?

I mean, yes, because we see that the people who eat the most sugar get the most diseases, right? So we see correlations, but they're not, they're not like a clinical trial. You can't take two populations and say, okay, everybody's 30 years old. We're gonna give this half a healthy no glucose spike diet and this half glucose spikes every single day. And then we'll see when they're 80, you know, which group has aged faster. We can't do that. That's unethical. So we have to look at correlations, and we see things like, if you have really high glucose levels, high insulin levels, you're more likely to get heart disease, dementia, depression, et cetera, et cetera. We have correlative studies, and we understand the mechanism of the glycation.

What about the superficial signs of aging? Wrinkles.

Oh, like the wrinkles. A lot of skincare products actually target glycation from the outside in, so they'll put, like, antioxidants on your skin to reduce glycation. If you're in the skincare world, you'll see glycation mentioned everywhere. What they don't do is they don't look at how to reduce glycation from the inside out, which is what I think is more interesting. And it's through food. By reducing your glucose levels, you reduce glycation. It's just like a to b. It's very simple.

So if I want to stave off wrinkles, then I should keep my glucose levels down?

Yes. And you should also avoid smoking, you know, wear sunscreen, etcetera. But in terms of your diet, what you want to focus on is focus on reducing glucose spikes. Yeah, absolutely.

What about things like acne and skin conditions?

So those are more inflammatory based diseases. So eczema, psoriasis, acne, rosacea, those are expressions of inflammation going on within your body. And I like to think of the skin as a mirror to what's going on within. And so inflammation can happen through loads of different factors, but one of the factors is glucose spikes. So, glucose spikes hurts our mitochondria, that creates inflammation, then glucose spikes lead to glycation, which also leads to inflammation and insulin release. And a lot of insulin also increases inflammation. So with every glucose spike, you're increasing inflammation within your body. And if you're susceptible to any of these skin conditions, you can have theraps or increase their intensity very simply.

And does it also have an impact on my hormonal balance? A lot of my friends, I'm in that age range now where a lot of my friends are trying to have children. And there's so much talk around things like polycystic ovary syndrome and fertility, and, you know, infertility in men with their sperm and all these kinds of things. Is there a link between glucose and hormones and fertility?

Yes. So we have studies that show that the more insulin resistant you are. So insulin resistance is a consequence of just a lot of insulin in the body, the more likely you are to be infertile. And then we also know that pcos, so, polycystic ovarian syndrome, which is one of the leading causes of infertility in women, we know that 60% of PCos cases also are people who have insulin resistance. There's a link there. Insulin resistant, you're more likely to have pcos. And we also know that when there's a lot of insulin in a female body, it tells your ovaries to produce more testosterone. Testosterone is the male sex hormone, and if you have too much male sex hormone in the body, that causes issues. It can cause acne, it can cause balding or hair growth on the face, and it can stop your period. Now, often when somebody has pcos, they're given the birth control pill, which kind of makes sense on the surface, but really doesn't solve anything. What happens when you take the birth control pill is that you're just ingesting female hormones. That's what the pill is. It's female hormones. So if you have high testosterone, all of a sudden you're ingesting female hormones.

So the balance kind of comes back to an okay situation. Your symptoms of excess testosterone go away. But as soon as you stop the pill, the high testosterone is still there. So a lot of people stop the pill trying to have a baby, and they're like, oh, I don't have my period. I have pcos. What do I do? So one recommendation I have is, if you have pcos, look at your glucose spikes first. It's not the only reason this can happen, but very often, when you fix your glucose and insulin levels, the symptoms of pcos go away.

I saw something on Twitter a couple of weeks ago that was trying to make the case that glucose and insulin responses are the reason for pcos. Yeah, some people believe that totally.

And, you know, it's a very politically charged topic. Some people believe you have pcos. It's genetic. You can't do anything about it. Other people believe, no, no. It's a metabolic disease. It's a cluster of symptoms that come from high insulin. I'm in that camp. But, you know, there are some cases where somebody has pcos and doesn't have high insulin levels. So what category do they go into? The thing with pcos, Steven, is that it's not a real condition. It's like a cluster of symptoms. So some people could have pcos and have cystic ovaries and balding. Somebody else could have pcos and have missed periods and hair growth on their chin. So it can take different forms. So I think we're starting to understand there are variations of pcos, and some are in the insulin resistant category.

Have you seen a woman reverse her pcos symptoms?

Tons. In my second book, I ran a study. Three females who were in the program doing my hacks for just a month got their period back and were able to get pregnant in that month. Just with my hacks, I see pcos reversal all the time.

So these hacks that you say those three women used to help reverse their pcos symptoms, what are the hacks?

Oh, the hacks.

What are the ones that they did?

So the ones they did were savory breakfast vinegar once a day, veggie starters, and moving after eating. And these are four hacks that are the four most important ones of my ten hacks that I've put together in the four week method, that second book. And if you do these hacks, you don't actually have to change anything else that you're eating. You don't have to cut out anything. You just add these in. I like to see them like little fairy godmothers that you have in your pocket, and you just put throughout your day like this, and you're able to reduce your glucose spikes while still eating what you love in a very low effort kind of way. And I believe these hacks should be seen like you would see. Brush your teeth, wear sunscreen, drink enough water. Have a savory breakfast. Move after eating.

Have a savory breakfast. So are you saying people shouldn't be eating sugar for breakfast?

Correct. The concept of a savory breakfast comes from the simple realization that if you have a breakfast that creates a big glucose spike, you're affecting your body in many bad ways. First of all, you're leading to your brain not functioning too well during that day. It's leading to brain fog. It can make you a bit confused. Second, it makes you tired. It increases cravings throughout the day, and it also deregulates your glucose levels for the rest of the day. Your breakfast is very powerful. If you have a glucose spike at breakfast, your whole day is a glucose roller coaster. So what you want to do, Steven, is always have a savory breakfast that keeps your glucose level steady. A savory breakfast is what it's based around. Protein. Eggs, fish, meat, tofu, nuts, dairy, protein powder, dinner leftovers. Okay. Protein. It's really important to have protein in the morning. Then you add some healthy fats. Olive oil, butter, avocado. And then if you want for taste, you can add a bit of starch, like a piece of bread, for example, or some potatoes. Importantly, a savory breakfast contains nothing sweet. No cereal, no muffins, no orange juice, no granola, no fruit puree, none of that.

It's really key.

Sugar in my coffee?

No, no, no. If you want sugar, have it as dessert after a meal, after lunch, or after dinner. Because after your lunch and after your dinner, you have lots of food already in the digestive system. So any sugar you put in afterwards is going to impact your glucose levels less.

You said that if I have something sweet for my breakfast, I'm then going to be on a glucose roller coaster.

Yeah.

Why?

Because glucose spike, then insulin comes out, and your glucose drop, then your glucose are low. Here you get really hungry, you have a lot of cravings. When our glucose levels are dropping, scientists have shown it increases the activity of the craving center in our brain. So it goes like, Stephen, eat some sugar. And you can't control that. So what do you do? You reach for more sugar, bam, another glucose spike. And then you just continue your whole day like that. So you sort of put yourself into a corner if you start your day with a spike. And it's really difficult to get off that roller coaster.

Does that roller coaster last across days?

Good question. Generally during the night, it sort of resets.

In my glucose test, I saw that when I go to sleep, it kind of flattens out, kind of goes quite low. At nighttime. However, I've got this unscientific observation where if I start, if I had a carrot cake now, there's a high probability that I'd probably want to have a carrot cake by dinner time tonight as well. And then when I wake up the next day, I probably. I'm going to be more likely to go for carrot cake again. And if I zoomed out on my life, say, the whole twelve months of a year, there will be maybe like this little week or two in clusters where maybe there's a couple of months in between, and then there's this two week fucking splurge again, where I find it really hard not to reach for something across multiple days. I'm not sure if this is in my head.

I think there's a few things going on. One, the taste is really addictive, so you get addicted to getting that taste and getting the dopamine. Don't forget there's the dopamine rush in your brain. Second, with every glucose spike, you're actually deregulating your hunger hormones. So you get, you have more cravings, you're hungrier. And yes, this can totally last for a few days. And I think, thirdly, if you have the carrot cake at home for a few days, maybe you're just more likely to reach for it because it's there. But I feel similarly to you. I have these phases, especially if I'm really busy and I can't do all the hacks all the time, where I'm eating a bunch of sugar and then it lasts until I say, okay, stop back on the hacks, and I do the hacks for two days and then I'm good again.

That's the same with me. But also I find that if I do a really big workout, for me, it helps to break that cycle. So if I, this weekend I did a. I think I was in that cycle of like, I wasn't reaching for sugar as in like something sweet. I was reaching for like us having a lot of like toast with my breakfast or us having like carbs. And then I did a really big workout and the last thing I wanted was anything with carbs in or glucose.

I think it's also in the brain, you know, because you're rebalancing those hormones that dopamine, you're getting endorphins from the workout, so you're not seeking all that pleasure from just sugar. I think if you're in a cycle where all you're just getting dopamine from sugar, it just becomes addictive and you have to do stuff in your life that allows you to feel good in your brain without having that sugar.

So maybe I got the dopamine from the workout instead.

Totally.

And so I kind of shifted the source of dopamine. So that was the first hack, which.

Is the savory breakfast super key, by the way. If you just do one hack, do this one. It is a complete game changer. And a savory breakfast should keep you satiated for 4 hours, which is a long time. Most people get hungry again 2 hours after they have breakfast. So make sure you're having enough protein in your breakfast to stay full for 4 hours.

Okay. On that. What if I fast?

Totally fine. Make sure the first meal of your day is also savory. So it can be at 08:00 a.m. it can be at 04:00 p.m. i do not care as long as the first thing that you eat is something savory. Because when you're fasted, your digestive system is super empty and sensitive. So whatever you give it, whether it's in the morning after just sleeping, or whether it's after a two week fast, is going to go really quickly into your bloodstream. So you have to be cautious and make sure you're not giving your body glucose, otherwise big spike.

Do you think fasting is good for you? Intimate and fasting?

I think it's nuanced. I think what I've seen is that in men it just works way better. In females, it can kind of mess up your hormones. You have to be a bit judicious about when you fast. And we also have to remember, guys, fasting is a stressor on the body. It is a good stressor, but it is a stressor. So if you have an intense job, kids to take care of you, drink coffee, you have, you know, three times a week, you do hiit cardio, then you do a sauna, then you do a cold plunge, then you fast. Your body is going to freak the fuck out. You have to, like, dose these stressors in a way that is going to be manageable for your body. I see lots of women who do all those things I just mentioned, and then they're like, and I don't have my period, and I don't understand and I don't feel good. I'm like, your body is freaking out, like, relaxed. You can't be putting all these stressors on yourself all the time. So I fast when I'm on vacation.

And what kind of fasting do you do?

I like, we'll skip a meal, we'll skip dinner, we'll skip breakfast. And it just helps your body clean up its dead cells. And it's really helpful. But we have to remember that fasting is a stressor. It has great benefits, but you don't have to fast in order to be healthy. It's very important to also look at what you're eating, because if you're fasting 16 hours a day and then you're just eating junk food, it's not going to be helpful to your body. We have to do both in combination.

Do you fast naturally?

Yeah.

So I haven't eaten today. What time are we? 01:00 and I won't eat until you've had a coffee. I've had a coffee this morning. Yeah. But I won't eat until 04:00 p.m. 05:00 p.m. which will be probably, you know, after I get back to the office and stuff like that.

And you feel good?

I feel fine.

That's the thing, right? My recommendation is if you feel great, fab, if you feel stressed out, if you feel light, hated, if it feels hard, then don't do it. Your body can't handle it.

Just doesn't cross my mind to eat. I don't know how people eat it.

It's amazing. Yeah. Then go for it. Live your life, man. Live your life.

Stephen, what about calorie restriction? Do you think much about that?

I mean, it works, right? If you eat fewer calories, you're gonna lose weight. But this is one of my favorite stories. Do you know how calories were invented?

Maybe.

Okay.

They like, put it in a box and burnt it.

Yes, I told you that. Yes. So back in the day, to measure calories, what do you want to measure the calorie of? Tell me something.

Some of the food, carrot cake.

Okay. Okay. So if we were back in the day, like 100 years ago, and wanted to measure the calories in your carrot cake, here's what we would do. We would take the carrot cake, put it in a box, then put this box in an aquarium filled with water. So you have the aquarium and then inside you have the box with the carrot cake. Then we would light the carrot cake on fire inside the small box and measure by how many degrees the water in the aquarium increased in temperature. So we're just measuring the heat that is created when we burn the carrot cake. That is how we measure calories, by how much heat is generated when you burn a food. So if you were to put in that same box, I don't know, three avocados and you burnt them, you might get the same temperature increase in the water. So you might say, oh, this carrot cake and these three avocados have the same number of calories. But the thing is, with the calorie thing, it's nothing. Not actually telling you what's in the food. It's just measuring energy that dissipated when you burnt it.

It's not telling you the carrot cake is going to lead to a big glucose spike, going to make you inflamed, age faster, release insulin, whereas the three avocados will keep you steady and feeling better. So two people can be eating 2000 calories diet. One person can be eating in a way that keeps their glucose nice and steady. They feel good, good energy, fewer cravings, clear brain, not super hungry all the time. The other person can be eating just glucose, spiking food and they're having a terrible time, they're hungry constantly, they have cravings, brain fog, insulin release. So calories are interesting, but they're not everything. We need to teach people about the molecules in their food. I find that to be a much easier way to try to eat a bit less if you're trying to lose some fat, is to just focus on your glucose levels, because naturally your hunger hormones will rebalance, you'll have fewer cravings and it's much easier to eat less.

Is there a story that you've been sent or a case study from someone that's followed your work, that stuck with you? Someone that's understood their glucose and had a big shift in their life?

I imagine there's thousands, but yeah, there's many, many. I think there's two things for me, there's the pregnancy stories, because I think that's so touching, because I've had many friends go through difficult fertility journeys and to hear people who were about to embark on really intense fertility treatments and just tried this and then got pregnant, I think that's really cool. And then, second, I think it's the people who. There was this one guy, he's had diabetes his whole life. He's, like, in his fifties, on lots of medication, and just thought he would lose a leg and lose his vision. That's what happens when you have type two for a very long time. And the thing is, his doctors had never explained to him why he had diabetes. They had just told him, take this pill, and I take this insulin. And he read my book, and he understood why he got diabetes in the first place. He did the hacks. He was able to reverse his type two diabetes in one year. All his doctors were like, how did you do it? You know, doctors don't often have this kind of information. And then he sent me a long message saying, now I'll be able to see my grandkids wedding.

And I really thank you for that. So cute. You know, we're all stuck in this vicious cycle of having this toxic food around us that's making us sick but not understanding how to get out of it. And everybody wants to be healthy. That man, he was eating stuff that he thought would be good for him. He was eating, like, the low calorie rice cakes and the fruit smoothies and the low fat yogurts and all these things, trying to be healthier. But if you don't have the right information, you can't actually make a change.

What would you say to parents? It's really interesting because I've had the experience of watching a lot of early parents over the last couple of months, and they care so much about their kids just eating it. Something that often, they'll give them something that is high in glucose. Does it matter? You know, because sometimes people look at kids and go, well, they're a kid, they'll kind of, it won't have an impact on them. They'll kind of grow out of it. Well, we'll make sure that they eat healthy later. We just need to make sure they eat something.

Now, listen, we used to think type two diabetes was a disease reserved for adults, and now five year olds get it. It's very important to help your kids eat well so that they set up their body in a healthy way. One thing that I hear is, yeah, Jesse, I know I should be giving my kids eggs in the morning, but they just keep begging for the cereal, and I just, I can't say no. You know, they they won't. They won't let go. I have to give it to them. And I say, what if they were begging you for cigarettes? Would you give them the cigarettes? Like, you don't actually have to give your kids this food. It's hard, for sure. But if it's a priority for you, you can totally do it. Absolutely. And I think it's important to set an example, actually, because if you're having cereal and orange juice, it's going to be really hard for your kids to take you seriously. Like, come on, dad, like, you know, shut up.

What do you think of giving kids orange juice?

Oh, my God. It's terrible. It's the worst. It's terrible. It's a big rush of sugar can affect behavior, you know, tensions and sugar cravings and the sugar lows. I mean, no, it's terrible. It breaks my heart. I'm like, wow, those little bodies are not happy right now.

You know, there's so many parents that are listening right now. Like, you don't fucking get it. You too childless.

Totally. And that's why, Steven, you know, when I have kids, I totally want to write a book about that, because I think there's lots of stuff we can teach parents about how to feed their kids. It's too easy for me to say this stuff. I don't have kids. I don't know how it is. But I can tell you one thing. There will be no orange juice in my house. No orange juice. Like, my mom. My mom was addicted to Diet Coke when she was younger, so we never had soda in our house. Never. And I hate. I hate soda now. I would never be able to drink any of that stuff because it was never. I never learned to like it. So don't be scared that your kid is gonna binge if you restrict all the sugary stuff. I think it's the opposite. I think if you don't give them the habits, they just won't have the habit.

I do agree. We didn't have many sweet things or fizzy drinks or anything in the house. And I think as a kid, I was resentful because you go to school and you'd see those things, so you'd lean towards them and you'd love them at school. But frankly, as I've grown older, I'm completely cool with just drinking water all the time. That's partly because that's what we had in the house. So my relationship with water is pretty strong.

I feel you. But, you know, one thing that parents do tell me is that when they do their glucose hacks, and they manage their glucose levels. They're able to be more zen around their kids and sort of, you know, stay a bit more centered when their kids are freaking out or asking about something a lot. Their mood is steadier, so they can actually make better choices for the whole family, and they have a bit more stamina, and then their kids do the hacks, and their kids get calmer, and then the family is just having a better time, generally, but it can really impact even a marriage. This is a great study I have to tell you about that was looking at married couples. So they recruited 300 married couples. And bless these scientists, they're just insane. So they recruited 300 married couples. They gave each person in the marriage a voodoo doll representing their spouse. So if you're in a marriage, you have a voodoo doll representing your husband or your wife. Scientists then asked the people to put a pin in the voodoo doll representing their spouse every time their spouse annoyed them for six weeks.

At the end of the study, they took all the voodoo dolls, counted the pins. They also measured the participants glucose levels. What they found, Stephen, is that those who had more variable glucose levels, specifically those who had more low glucose level events, which happens after spikes, had put more pins in the voodoo doll representing their spouse. So their glucose levels seem to be linked to how irritated they were with their partner. And then the scientists speculated that this had to do with a neurotransmitter called tyrosine. And the more glucose roller coaster you have going on, the lower your tyrosine levels. And tyrosine balances our mood. So the food you eat can impact your marriage. It can impact how you show up with others, can impact how you feel about other people's behavior. It goes really deep. It's not just about diabetes. It impacts who you are as a person, your personality.

So if I stop eating sugar, it will save my marriage.

I mean, you said it.

It's really interesting. I was thinking, as you were talking as well, about how glucose is linked to our sort of discipline more broadly. You know, you were talking earlier about parents and then being able to be more sort of disciplined and strict with nutritions and calm when they themselves get their glucose under control. But you think about all of our lives. Our lives are shaped by the habits that we perform consistently. For us to have good habits that are conducive with our health, our happiness, our success, then we need to be focused and disciplined and be able to reach for the right things, whether it's a dumbbell or whether it's our laptop. So, like, do you ever think much about the role that glucose plays with our sort of discipline to be who we want to be, to show up how we want to show up completely?

Because so many people are stuck in a cycle of being a victim to their cravings, being a victim to their fatigue, and they can't show up as the person they want to be. And if you switch your diet and use these hacks, you can actually be more connected to the version of yourself that you want to be. And even just a simple thing like a savory breakfast, it can deeply change how you show up throughout your day. Instead of being exhausted at 11:00 a.m. needing four coffees, feeling lethargic in your work meeting, then at 03:00 p.m. thinking, oh, I really want to have a nap. I would have a nap on the floor right here if I could. Looking for sugar all the time. You actually have a clearer brain. Like, we know glucose spikes are linked to even just brain fog, and brain fog is a debilitating symptom to have. You can't show up as the person you want to be. I would never be able to do the work that I do if I didn't have my glucose under control. And I learned that from the very beginning. That's why I got into this work in the first place.

But 100%, I agree with you. Yeah.

So the first hack we talked about was the savory breakfast. There was a second one you talked about vinegar, which we talked about last time, which I remember I was really repulsed by. But you count this as one of your most important hacks, is to eat vinegar every day.

It's drink one tablespoon of vinegar in a big glass of water before your biggest meal of the day. And the reason it's important, Stephen, is because it's easy. And I'm all about easy hacks. Big bang for your buck. So vinegar contains acetic acid, which interacts with your digestive enzymes and cuts the glucose spike of your meal by up to 30% with no effort. So if you want a super low effort, albeit not very delicious, super low effort hack, to try, do that and see how you feel with a smaller spike and a smaller crash. Fewer cravings, less fatigue.

What kind of vinegar?

Any kind of vinegar. It can be the vinegar you have at home. Literally, tonight, just grab the white vinegar in your kitchen and not the cleaning vinegar. If it's next to the toilet paper, it's not the right vinegar. You want the kitchen vinegar. One tablespoon in a big glass of water, dilute it, drink it ten minutes before having your dinner, see how you feel.

What role is the water playing in this?

Just dilution so that it doesn't hurt your teeth, because your dentist won't be very happy if you take a shot of vinegar because it can hurt your teeth's enamel.

Okay, so that's hack number two. And that's really to sort of line my stomach to.

So, no, that's to interact with your digestive enzymes. The line stomach is the third hack, which is veggie starters. So all around the world, if you look at different cultures, you see this habit, this tradition of starting your meal with veggies. In Italy, anti pasti in France, raw vegetables at the beginning of your meal. In the middle east, you start your meals with herbs by the bunch. Right. Why are we doing this, veggies first thing? Well, recently, scientists have discovered why it's so powerful. It's because veggies contain fiber. We love fiber. She's the best. When you have fiber at the beginning of a meal, what it does is that it coats your intestine. It makes it sort of protective barrier, this protective mesh, kind of gooey, fibrous mesh. And so any glucose you eat afterwards will not be able to go through your intestine into your bloodstream so quickly. So it slows down the arrival of glucose into your blood and it slows down that spike. You can make the experiment if you're wearing a monitor. Just have a small plate of, you know, carrots or spinach or broccoli or cherry tomatoes or whatever veggie you like before a meal and see how much smaller your glucose spike.

You stay fuller for longer, have fewer cravings, and you're helping your body from within, too.

And the fourth one you mentioned was moving after you've eaten.

Yeah. So after eating, use your body and your muscles for ten minutes. You can clean your apartment, go for a walk with your dog, dance to a few songs. If you're at the office, you can do calf raises under your desk like this. So you just sort of push up onto the balls of your feet, up and down for ten minutes. Nobody will see. And your calves contain a muscle called the soleus muscle, which is really good at soaking up glucose. But it's what we were talking about earlier, Stephen. Your muscles are really effective glucose dumps, and the more you use them to contract, the more they're going to soak up glucose from your bloodstream to use for energy. So that's the four hacks savory breakfast, vinegar once a day, veggie starter once a day. You can also combine those two and do, like a vinegar dressing on a veggie starter and then moving after eating. And then when you want to get pro, you go, to all my other.

Hacks, people talk about being in a food coma after they've eaten.

Yeah.

Which is, I mean, the antithesis of what you're saying.

Absolutely. Food coma is like a combination of brain fog and fatigue. Right.

And what's going on there?

Well, I think there's a lot of things going on, but one study that's really interesting shows us that in rats, when you create lots of big glucose spikes and when you monitor the activity of their neurons, in the rats, scientists noticed that the more glucose spikes they had, the slower the speed of the signal between their neurons. So their brain was literally slowing down. The information was going more slowly throughout the brain, and they theorized that in humans, this could lead to brain fog. So you have glucose spikes linked to brain fog and your mitochondria becoming exhausted from big glucose spikes, potentially making you really tired 90 minutes after eating. With the hacks, food coma reduced significantly. So you can actually do stuff after eating instead of just being lying down and not being able to get up.

And you took these hacks, and you did an experiment, right on page seven of your book, the glucose goddess Method, you talk about this 2700 person pilot experiment that you did in 2019.

Yeah.

Which of the hacks did you use for this experiment and what did you find?

So it was these four hacks. So it was a four week experiment. Week one, you start your savory breakfast every day. You do that for the four weeks. Week two, you add in vinegar once a day, you continue for the rest of the three weeks. Week three, you add veggie starters. And week four, you add moving after eating. You don't have to change anything else about what you're eating. I'm not cutting out sugar. I'm not telling you to not drink alcohol. I'm not telling you to not drink pasta. I'm just asking you to add these four hacks in and see what happens.

And these people were from 110 countries?

Yeah, I recruited them online through Instagram.

Between the ages of 20 and 70 years old. And what happened?

Listen, the results were really stunning. So 90% of people reduced their cravings, 90% of people had more energy. You had really significant impacts on sleep, on hormones, on skin, on mood, on diabetes. I mean, of course, this is not a placebo controlled, randomized trial. It's just an experiment. I didn't have a control group, but these numbers are pretty remarkable. And that's what I see when I meet people, when I see the testimonials from my readers. It's just very quick impact, because glucose spikes impact all parts of our system, physical and mental. And when you balance them, Stephen, you're creating a much better foundation for your body and your mind to be healthy.

And these are self reported symptoms, right?

Totally, yeah. So we did a survey at the end of every of the four weeks and just measured the results.

And when you say there's no control group, that means that there wasn't another group who weren't, who were doing like.

A different kind of intervention or placebo. No.

Okay.

So it was just 3000 people doing the hacks and I was just asking them questions at the end.

And it says here roughly 40% of people who wanted to lose weight did in fact lose weight in those four weeks.

Yeah. With no calorie restriction, no request to eat less. And the reason this is interesting is that even though weight loss is not the primary objective of balancing your glucose levels, what happens when you reduce your spikes is that you reduce cravings because you're not activating that craving center anymore. You reduce hunger, you have more energy to potentially move more, and you lower your insulin levels. Now, this is very important because when there's insulin present in your body, you cannot burn fat. Insulin is storing fat and making more fat. And when you lower insulin, you can actually burn some of the fat that you stored.

And there's going to be people screaming because they want to know the other sort of six, this ten, right?

Yeah. I can go through all of them if you want.

Yeah. So what the other six are.

Of course, of course, of course. Another hack is eating your food in the right order. Now, this is kind of similar to the veggie starter. It's just a bit more complicated. And it's really where the science, it's really what the science shows us. The science shows us that if you eat a meal in the right order, meaning veggies first, then proteins and fats, then starches and sugars instead of the opposite, you reduce the glucose spike of the meal by up to 75%. You're eating the same meal, the same quantity, the same food, just the order. And using that fiber first mentality is going to reduce your spike significantly.

Just to be clear, this doesn't mean that I'm going to gain less weight from that meal.

Well, no, because it doesn't, you know, weight loss doesn't happen within one specific meal, but it does mean you'll have fewer cravings a couple hours after that meal. So maybe you won't reach for the donuts. That's how it would work.

So, indirectly, am I not gay? More waves.

Exactly. Exactly. So eating your food in the right order. Okay. Having a savory breakfast. We talked about it. Veggies first. We talked about it. Vinegar. We talked about it moving after eating. We talked about it. And then there's clothes on carbs. So that means anytime you eat starches or sugars, which are the big category of carbs, make sure you're never eating them naked or on their own, because if you eat them on their own, they just turn into glucose really, really quickly. So instead of having a slice of bread on its own, have bread and some avocado, add some fat to that. That's a good clothing to add, or add some protein or add some fiber. If you're having a carrot cake, don't have it on its own. Have it with a greek yogurt, for example. So that's close on carbs. It's really easy to remember, especially if you're going throughout your day and you can't really pick what you're eating because you don't have many options. Just think close on carbs. Then we have savory snacks. So during a day, if you want to have a snack between meals, when your stomach is empty, try to have something savory that won't increase your glucose spikes instead of having something sweet, then another hack that we kind of touched on is if you want to eat something sweet, have it as dessert instead of on an empty stomach.

So if I want a cookie or a carrot cake, I will make sure to buy it in the morning if I know where I want to get it from, and then have it as dessert after my lunch or after my dinner. So I'm not removing any of the sugar from your life, I'm just showing you how and when to eat it so it will reduce the glucose spike. And then we have always eat your fruit whole, never juiced, never dried, never smoothied, only whole to have that protective fiber in there.

Thinking about your instagram, you post these photos of glucose spikes in response to different foods. How do you trial that? Is that.

Oh, great question.

Those your spikes?

Yeah, those are my spikes or the spikes from somebody on my team. But it's really important to note that these spikes are just illustrating studies, trials that have been done by scientists around the world. So, for example, I'll find a clinical trial showing that vinegar before a meal reduces the glucose spike. It's been shown at scale with a placebo, you know, proper clinical study, and I'll just make an example with my own data to illustrate that scientific study. And that's why if you swipe on my post, you'll see my graph and then the study that I mentioned, or in the description of the post, I don't draw any conclusions from my own glucose data. I'm not like, oh, look, today I had a green tea and that didn't cause a spike. And yesterday I had a green tea and I also had a piece of, I don't know, whatever, an almond. And that caused the biggest spike. So I should be telling everybody to not have almonds. Like, that's not how it works at all. It's just an illustration of existing studies. That's my role, that's my job, that's what I love to do, to translate studies that are existing in a way that makes it easier for people to understand.

Because you can't just give somebody a scientific paper, you have to explain it in a visual way that they can immediately get it.

So of those visuals that you've made, is there some in particular that were most surprising to you or most shocking to you? Because I'm going to put some of them on the screen. So some of them that come to mind that were maybe had the biggest response from your audience, for example?

Yeah, I think some of the ones that show traditional food combinations and how they're actually good for our glucose levels are fascinating. For example, grapes and cheese. So I'm french, and often when you eat, like, a big plateau of cheese, you'll have some grapes there to have with. And, you know, the glucose response shows us that if we had the grape on its own, it would be a bigger spike than the grape with the cheese. Not only is it really delicious, it's also better for your glucose levels because you're putting clothing on that sugary carb that is the piece of fruit or ham and melon or rice and beans. All these traditional combinations cause smaller spikes than you would expect from the individual ingredients. That's really quite fascinating in terms of the most shocking ones. I think any glucose graph showing food order is really interesting. So, for example, if you have salad and then pasta, which is much better for your glucose levels than having pasta and then the salad.

Interesting.

Yeah. And that's the food order hack going on.

Do you know off the top of your head what your most engaged post has been of all time. The one that's been shared the most or commented on the most, actually.

It's one currently, at least on YouTube. It's one where I explain, where I show an image of an ancestral banana, what bananas used to actually look like in nature, and what bananas look like today, to illustrate that the fruit that you find today in a supermarket is not natural. So that's a very, very popular one. And then I think it's the hacks. It's the glucose graphs and the videos where I explain food order. People really love that. It's so interesting to see that if you have your veggies at the beginning of a meal, you have such a big impact on your glucose levels. Whereas we've all been taught that all your food mixes in your stomach and makes this big smoothie. And it doesn't matter. Well, it does, actually.

Yeah, because that's really easy to change as well.

Totally. You don't have to change what you're eating, how much you're eating. Just next time you're sat at a meal, think, oh, I'm going to have the veggies on my plate first. That's it. So powerful. These hacks are so easy, Steven. I really want everybody to know them. I want to become irrelevant. I don't want to have any more work, because everybody knows these hacks. It's so important for our public health.

I think some vinegar has arrived for you to shot.

Yeah. No, we can't shot it, Stephen. We have to dilute it.

I'll dilute it as well.

Go for it.

Yes. So this is cider vinegar, but any vinegar works.

You don't have to buy expensive vinegar. It doesn't have to be organic, unfiltered, whatever.

Kitchen vinegar works and I try it straight. I've actually never really drink.

Okay. But if your dentist is upset, it's not my fault.

Okay, well, so Jesse told me to drink this straight. No, she's an expert. She said she's a scientist. Oh, gosh.

Yeah. You're not supposed to do that, Stephen.

No, I'm sorry. No, it's been really lovely. Going to imagine if it's not that bad, but it's not something that I would do for fun.

Yeah. But also, if you want to have vinegar straight, you need to get higher quality vinegar. There's some vinegars that taste really, really good. But in our case, we're just trying to get the acetic acid. And we don't need high quality, expensive vinegar. We can just do, like, really cheap vinegar. And this is a we just put one tablespoon. This is a good hack. If you have a parent that has diabetes and they don't want to change anything about their lifestyle, just get them to add this before their meals when they're eating carbs, and you'll see a good impact on their glucose levels. Okay. So I'm mixing it like this.

You didn't put much in there.

I put a tablespoon. It's a tablespoon.

And even that small amount, you literally look like you kind of filled the lid.

I filled the lid twice, basically, which is approximately one tablespoon, I think, because this is probably like. Yeah, this is half a tablespoon, I would say. Okay. Okay, I've done this before, and now you can't taste anything.

You're telling me that that will have an impact?

Absolutely, and the studies prove it.

I can't taste anything. Yeah, maybe because I just had the big shot.

Yeah, I think so. Totally, Steven. I even meet people on the street, or, like, my readers and stuff, and they'll show me that in their purse, they have a little bottle of vinegar they take with them. It's super easy. And, you know, I was very skeptical, and I think everybody was super skeptical about the vinegar thing until the studies were widely read. It's an amazing ingredient that's been used for millennia for its health benefits, but now we understand how it works. It has impact on visceral fat, on cholesterol levels, on glucose, and on insulin levels. It's a magical ingredient. It's super cheap, so have some vinegar, but be very careful. Now, a lot of big brands are jumping on this and are making vinegar drinks that have sugar in them. So you want straight vinegar. You don't want anything that has even a tiny bit of apple juice or sugar. Uh, uh, uh. Straight vinegar.

You said visceral fat?

Yeah.

Is that belly fat?

Yeah, it's the fat between your organs. It's the fat that's really bad for you. So you can have fat that is sort of on the outside of your body, and you can. You can grab it. You know, you can grab it and you can really pinch it.

Speak yourself.

No, I totally have. Yeah. Yeah. So this fat, you know, I can grab.

Yeah.

Visceral fat is underneath my muscle layer. And you would know if somebody has visceral fat if they have kind of a big, hard belly. Have you ever seen that?

Yeah, yeah.

And they just kind of. But if you touch it, you can't make it into a roll. That's visceral fat. That's between your organs, and that's really bad for you. So vinegar helps. Of course. This is not a magic solution that's gonna fix all your issues and, you know, prevent a ton of diseases. It's a good ally to have, and I'm all about little allies you bring with you, gentle giants you have throughout your day that are going to help you get to health in an easy, manageable way.

So if I have that glass that you just made for me, which basically I can't taste the vinegar in because it's been diluted by water, and then I eat something, remind me again of the impact that that will have on my glucose spike.

So it'll reduce your glucose spike by up to 30%, and your insulin spike also by up to 30%. The way it works is that you have these little scissors in your stomach, like miniature scissors called enzymes. Their job is to chop up the starches and sugars and turn them into individual glucose molecules. It's a part of your digestive process. These enzymes do this job. Vinegar will temporarily inactivate some of those little scissors, essentially slowing down how quickly the glucose arrives into your bloodstream. It's all about velocity. We're all about trying to reduce the speed of arrival of glucose into your bloodstream. That's the key. So vinegar is a really effective way of doing this.

One of the things that I read online, as well about glucose, and again, this is like conspiracy theories that I'm looking around, I read, this is a variation of the tweet. I'll read it out. It says, sugar in a baby's brain is called ADHD. Sugar in adults, brain is called dementia and Alzheimer's. Sugar in your eyes is called glaucoma. Sugar in your teeth is called cavities. Sugar on your skin is called aging. Sugar in your sleep is called insomnia. Sugar in your blood is called diabetes. Sugar on Wall street is called a billion dollar industry.

Boom. I get the point. Yeah, I think sugar is definitely one of the main drivers of all these things. But there's other stuff going on, of course. But I like that. I think the Alzheimer's one is really interesting to talk about. There's a study that has followed people for 30 years, and they found that people who had elevated glucose levels in their forties were more likely to get Alzheimer's when they reached 60, 70, 80. So having high glucose levels at midlife is a risk factor for Alzheimer's when you're older. Not only that, but scientists have started to see that some of the things you see in the brain of someone with Alzheimer's are actually similar to what you see in the body of somebody with diabetes, namely inflammation, glycation, and insulin resistance. So much so that some scientists call Alzheimer's type three diabetes diabetes of the brain. Pretty freaking fascinating.

There's going to be so many people that are listening to our conversation when we talked about PCOS or Alzheimer's or all these kinds of things that think, like, how is it fair that I've got these conditions when I don't even eat as much sugar as most people? They probably look at someone who is really binging out on sugar, who doesn't have any of these things. If I was a woman and I had PCOS and I ate just a little bit of sugar, I'd be like, this is not fair. And a second ago, when you said at 40, if you have elevated glucose levels, is that relative to like, or is that to your response?

No, they're looking at fasting glucose. So a measure of how diabetic you are, essentially, if you're healthy, pre diabetic or diabetic. So it's not looking at the spikes, it's looking at your baseline in the morning, which is what doctors measure with a blood test.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, but, Stephen, life is unfair. Like, I. My glucose spikes led to terrible mental health, episodes of depersonalization. Lots of people I know eat so much sugar all the time have never had one mental health issue in their life. I don't have all the answers to that. We just know that on average, if you look at everybody, by reducing those spikes, you're going to reduce the likelihood of these diseases. But you see people who, like, smoke two packs of cigarettes a day, drink two liters of orange juice, and live to 120 with no health issues. And you have people who are perfectly healthy, who get cancer at 25 and die like, I'm not God. I don't know. But what I do know is that in a lot of cases, when you have a condition that's linked to glucose levels and you apply these hacks, you can get relief or remission. That's all I know.

Are there any societies where they just don't really eat sugar that you can think of or any sort of.

I think any culture, any country that's been globalized and now has access to, like, fizzy drinks and stuff? It's so addictive, that stuff. As soon as you introduce it somewhere, everybody starts drinking it.

I'd love to do a continuous glucose monitor on, like, the Hadza tribe or something in Africa and see amazing. If they're, like, inflammation levels and stuff.

Yeah. I would do continuous glucose monitor, but also fasting glucose levels. Right. To just kind of see what their baseline is at. Do any of them have diabetes? Pre diabetes or. Not at all? What's going on? But, yeah, I agree. It's fascinating.

You mentioned a term earlier that I've only ever heard used when talking about a zempeg. Glp one.

Yeah.

What relationship does glucose have with GLP ones? And what the hell is a GLp one?

It's so interesting. So, in your digestive system, you have these little cells. They're called l cells, and they're, like little sensors, and they just hang out there in your digestive tract, just, like, chilling and doing nothing. And then as soon as you eat and they sense food, they wake up. They're, like, alert. We have a job to do, and their job is to release a substance called GLP one. This substance then goes to different parts of your body and tells you that you've eaten enough food and you can stop eating. So, for example, you're having a big plate of pasta. The starch goes into your digestive system. Little l cells sense the pasta. They're like, oh, we've eaten food. And then it tells your brain, Steven, you can stop eating. You don't have to eat another five pounds of pasta. You're satiated, and you become less hungry. Not only that, but GLP one also helps your body deal with that glucose spike. It says, alert glucose is here. Let's put some of that glucose away into liver, muscle, and fat cells. So Glp one is a totally normal part of our physiology. It's been there forever.

We all have it. But recently, it's been kind of just taking advantage of. So there were scientists in pharma companies who said, hey, this GlP one thing is pretty cool. What happens if we give somebody ten times, 20 times, 100 times more GLP one than they naturally have? What's going to happen? Let's test that. So they did that, and what happened was people's glucose levels started decreasing a lot, because, remember, GLP one put glucose away. Second, people stopped eating. They were not hungry anymore. Appetite zapped. GLP one is a very powerful appetite suppressant, especially when you have it in massive doses. So the pharma companies were like, huh, this is going to be a helpful drug. And first, it was just for people with diabetes, okay? To reduce your glucose levels. Now, it's been used for weight loss basically throughout the world. It's so popular, and you might think oh, GLP one is so cool. It's helping people lose weight. For me, Steven, I'm like, guys, do you realize what's going on? Do you realize that we've had to invent a drug to prevent people from eating the food around them because the food around them is so toxic that it's making them sick.

It's as if we found out that tap water was toxic and killing us. And instead of fixing the tap water being toxic, we invented a drug that made you less thirsty. How messed up is that, that we need this drug today to protect us from the food around us, because the food around us is causing so many issues. So that's my little soapbox. But the GLP one drugs are really interesting because they cut people's appetite, so people lose a lot of weight. There's a few problems with those. First, up to 40% of the weight that is lost is actually muscle mass. They're not drugs that just make you lose fat. You lose cells from everywhere in your body. And muscle mass are really important for longevity, for health, for your glucose levels. And then when people stop taking these drugs, on average, they gain back 70% of the weight that they lost. And they don't gain back muscle, they gain back fat. So if you're on one of these drugs, you can actually end up in a worse situation than when you stop taking it. So if you're on one of these weight train three times a week, eat a lot of protein to make sure you're not losing too much muscle mass.

And I see this everywhere. Some people, they just need this stuff because they're so stuck in a cycle of not having access to good food. And in a cycle of crisis, essentially, their body is really broken. They're really sick, and they just need a way out of. But to me, it's wild that we got to this point.

Are you saying that you're not a fan of people taking a zenpak, or are you saying that you're not a fan of the environment that has caused the need or rise in Zempeg?

I'm not a fan of the fact that we truly need this to save people's lives because the food system is so toxic and messed up that the only solution is to stop people from eating the food around them.

What's the solution? There is the solution. You're proposing that the government regulates food more harshly?

Yeah, I think it's regulation. It's also, you know, these big food companies, the food industry, they need to be making money, right? They need to make sure, their shareholders are happy, and the problem is, most of them make toxic products that are full of sugar. But they would love to make products that are lower in sugar, but people don't like the lower in sugar products. It's just like a systemic issue we have to all fix together. We either have to say, okay, all food companies, nobody's allowed to put more than x amount of sugar in any product ever. And then we have to educate people and tell them, hey, anytime there's sugar in a product, that's dessert, that's not real food. We have to give people access to food. So many people live in food deserts, and all they have is soda and processed frozen meals. It's a global, complicated, complicated problem. I don't have the answer to it, but I'm hoping that people are waking up and trying to make change happen.

I was listening to a conversation this morning, funnily enough, in the shower, and in part of the podcast, they said there was one of the hosts who was trying to frame it as this kind of like, sugar conspiracy theory, and it's like processed food conspiracy theory, where, like, big pharma are all in on it and there's these evil people in this tower or whatever. And then it was rebuttal by the other host who basically made the case, which I kind of believe that actually it's not necessarily this big conspiracy theory. It's really a case of incentives, like commercial incentives. And he explained that one of the leading soda brands that we all know and drink, probably the most famous in the world, they basically ran a study where they put different amounts of sugar into their drink to see what sold the most. And the scientists there put like 30 grams in, 40 grams in, 50 grams, 60 grams in. Some people loved 30 grams, some people loved 60 grams of sugar. But the thing that resulted in the highest sell through of this drink that we all know of was like 42 grams of sugar.

So that's what they went with.

Absolutely.

And again, like, it sounds really, really evil, but when you just break something down to the incentives, a company has a key KPI and OKR and a metric of make more money. They are publicly listed, they've got investors. They don't make more money, they die. So that's their incentive. And if they find out that 42 grams of sugar in a drink is going to result in that goal being methadone, then that's what they're going to do.

Totally. Stephen, I used to think when I was younger that diabetes was sort of invented by the food industry and the pharma industry, because when you think about it, it's a perfect disease. Because when you have diabetes is caused by eating too much crap food over too long. And then once you have diabetes, instead of saying, hey, stop the crap food, they just give you medication that allows you to keep eating the crap food and manage your condition. And then you need more medication and you're eating more crap food and then you die. So I thought this is like the perfect conspiracy. If Bigfoot and big pharma were like, how are we going to make the most money possible? But actually it's way more complicated than that. It's a very tough situation. I don't have the answer, but I'm hoping that in my lifetime we'll see some progress. Because I really do believe that the people in these companies, they want to do better. They don't want people to die, they don't want people to get sick, but they also have to make sure that the company is making money. So how do you bridge those two?

That's a really interesting question.

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To learn more about Colgate total superior science, visit the link in the episode description below. What about menopause? Interested in this? I've talked a lot on this podcast about menopause. Is there any link between glucose, glucose spikes and menopause?

Yeah. So, unfortunately, once you go through menopause, your glucose response to the same food becomes higher, so your body is less good. I know you're making a sad face. I know it's difficult. Your glucose levels naturally increase. Your glucose spikes naturally increase. What I have found in the studies, which is interesting, is that in females going through menopause, when you reduce the amount of sugar in the diet and reduce their glucose spikes, you do get some relief from your symptoms, whether it's insomnia, hot flashes. You do see that food can impact how bad of a time you have when you go through this process. Have I depressed you?

No, no, I just. So, okay, so I've got the hacks. I kind of understand the impact that glucose is having on my body now. I guess the. It's funny because there's a whole spectrum of people that listen. There's some people that listen to this, that will be on one side of the spectrum where they're really struggling with sugar. Maybe they're clinically obese, and maybe they just can't get out of that, that roller coaster, those cravings. And it's probably somewhat emotional. Yeah, there's probably some kind of trauma there or something. Maybe there's a genetic predisposition or whatever. But for those people, like, I don't know what to offer them, really, what can I offer them? What can we offer them?

So people who are stuck in a.

Craving cycle that are the extreme end of the craving cycle.

Okay, so when you're at the extreme end of the craving cycle, you are a victim to your sugar cravings. Throughout the day you'll be like, I need sugar, I need sugar. You go grab it, right? Yes. This can be due to emotional factors, but also it probably means I that you're on a big glucose roller coaster. It means you're activating that craving center in your brain multiple times every 2 hours. If before you eat something sweet, next time you have a craving, if you do one of these things, either you have a tablespoon of vinegar in water, either you have something else before, a little bit of broccoli, some cherry tomatoes, a carrot, some almonds, something that's going to put some clothing on those carbs, you'll be able to get the dopamine from the cravings. Sorry. You'll be able to get the dopamine from the sugar, but with less of a spike and less of a crash. So less activation of the craving center in your brain. And if you do this throughout the day, you're going to feel a little bit less urge for that sweet food. I don't think we can say these people are not going to benefit from studying their glucose levels.

I think that would be misguided.

You must have so many people that message you though, that have just tried and tried and tried and tried.

Yeah. Listen, for some people, they just can't do it. It's just hard for them. They're in a difficult economic, social relationship situation and they just can't do the hack right now. Maybe they'll be able to in a year. But most people who try and who are able to get their hands on savory breakfast ingredients, on vinegar, on some veggies, they see really good impacts. And that's what drives me, really.

And I guess much of what might motivate them or give them the discipline to stick is, I mean, this is certainly the case for me, is getting really clear on why all this stuff matters. I don't think humans are particularly good at thinking too far into the future. I think we're good at dealing with.

Prevention is not sexy. Right? Like if you tell somebody, oh, these glucose hacks are going to be good for you. So you prevent Alzheimer's. Like, nobody really cares unless you have a parent with Alzheimer's. But this stuff, not only does it help you long term, but even just forget about that. It will help you feel better today. Have fewer cravings for sugar today. Have more energy today to go and get your to do list and sleep better tonight. That's the stuff that motivates people. And it's easy, Stephen. It's easy, savory breakfast vinegar, veggie starter movement. It's easy, and you feel the impact immediately, so you want to keep going.

And on that point of today, if I'm doing a podcast episode and I'm sitting here for three, four, 5 hours sometimes for somebody, do you recommend that I avoid glucose before I do the podcast to make sure my cognitive performance might 100% yes.

Studies show that when you have a big glucose spike for breakfast before you do a cognitive task, you are not as good on their cognitive task as if you have steady glucose levels, because your brain also uses glucose for energy. And so it feels the ups and the downs and the inflammation and the glycation. If you want to really fuel your brain, have a nice savory breakfast or eat nothing if you don't feel like.

Eating well, you said that my brain uses glucose for energy. So if I have a massive bowl of sugar right before this conversation, isn't.

My brain gonna be like, no, it's like your mitochondria. It's like the plant. Some glucose, steady supply, good. Too much glucose at once. Stress. Stress in your mitochondria, stress in your body, too much water at once in a plant, plant dies. You want to make sure the supply is nice and steady. The variation is what causes issues.

You gave me this blue tube that's in front of me. What is this? It says, anti spike formula. I can't even pronounce it. That's not English.

Oh, did I give you a French?

You gave me a French.

The French one. Okay. In English, it should say, mix the glucose spike of carbs and sugar up to 40% smaller.

What is it?

Okay.

It's like. So for anybody that's just listening on audio, it's this little jar of tablets, little capsules. On each capsule, it says anti spike. Half of the capsule is green. The other half of it is this sort of, like, beige color, and it's got a powder in each capsule. There's 60 capsules in this little jar. What is it?

This is just me putting some cutting edge science into capsules so people can use it. So there have been two big scientific realizations that I wanted to share with people. The first one has to do with glp. One. So, you know those little cells that are sensing food and that produce glp. One in your body that I was mentioning. Nice. There's a molecule in lemon.

Look at me.

Look at you, Steve.

Who would have thought.

Who would have thought?

Look at us.

There you go.

The glucose goddess himself, drinking vinegar in this hand, anti spike formula in this hand. We're gonna live forever.

You're gonna live forever. We're gonna live forever. I really want to live until, like, 150, mostly because I want to see if they find aliens. Anyway, that's a sidebar.

So do you know what me and I just did then? Do you recognize it? Where? That guy's, I think, is it hot ones? And they're like an ass. Look at us. Look at us.

You're perfect, Steven. I'm so proud of you. Wait, wait. So I want to tell you this because it's really cool. So, you know, lemons, they're really yellow. Okay? So the reason they're yellow is because of the substance called eriocetrin. It's an antioxidant. It's really good. Eriocytrine has been discovered by scientists to be really good at increasing the amount of glp one your little l cells make. So on the one hand, you have, like, extreme pharma drugs giving you way too much glp one. And then on this side, you have natural stuff that can naturally increase glp one, which helps your glucose levels, your cravings, and your satiety. So this lemon molecule, ereocitrine, if you have enough of it, it's going to increase the amount of glp one your cells produce. The thing is, Steven, you need to have a lot of it. You need to drink, like, one and a half liters of lemon juice per day to get enough to impact your cells. Or you can extract it and you can concentrate it. And that's what I've done and put into anti spike. So this is a really cool, natural molecule that I want people to have access to to do the natural GLP one inquiry.

So this could glucose spike by up to 40%.

So the lemon extract doesn't do the glucose spike. It does the glp one thing. The other thing that I've put in anti spike is an extract from mulberry leaf. So mulberry leaf contains a molecule called DNJ, super cool molecule. When you have it before a meal, it goes and it interacts with those little scissors I was telling you about, that vinegar axon. And it prevents up to 40% of the glucose in your meal from being absorbed into your blood stream. So it just cuts by 40%. The glucose absorption, just the glucose, it doesn't cut the vitamins, the protein, the minerals, nothing. So I've put these two amazing scientific discoveries into this bottle with the best quality extracts, et cetera, because they were not on the market and I wanted people to have access to them. Again, you can just do the food hacks, you don't need this. But if you want supplement help, don't go for berberine, don't go for vinegar capsules. This is what you need.

What is the most important thing? We haven't spoken about that you think we should have.

There's a new study that I wanted to mention on depression, which I think is really interesting, that has followed people for ten years. So it followed 300 people. None of them had insulin resistance or depression at the beginning of the study. And insulin resistance, as I explained, is just a consequence of lots of glucose spikes over a long time. They followed these people for ten years. They found that in the people who developed insulin resistance within those ten years, there was almost a twofold increase in the development of major depression as well. So insulin resistance is correlated to major depressive disorder. Not saying it's causing it, but for me, the connection between glucose and mental health is truly fascinating. And as you know, and we discussed on our previous episode, that's the reason I got into this in the first place. And seeing more studies come out like this, linking the two, I think we're going to learn so much in the next few years.

I mean, I think, as you were saying, that I was thinking about, you know, if I have a high glucose diet, then it has a ton of downstream consequences, one of which is like, my sleep is going to be terrible. If my sleep is terrible, I'm probably going to be more likely to be depressed.

Yeah, absolutely.

Do you think much about sleep in glucose? Has anyone ever.

I do, yeah. There's some studies showing that if you go to bed after dinner, that has caused a big glucose spike, you're going to have have less restorative, deep sleep. And for me, if I go to bed with a big glucose bike at dinner, in the morning, I wake up and I'm so hungry. It's always like, inevitably, if my dinner causes a big spike, I'm hungry as soon as I wake up, like gargling hunger. So I think sleep and food are more related than we think. And then if we're tired, our glucose spikes will be higher the next day, which means we'll have more cravings, because if your body's tired, it can't manage glucose as effectively. In fact, another study I want to mention, which is really cool. So you're a coffee drinker now. Coffee in some people causes glucose spikes. Even black coffee, because of the stress response. Have you ever seen a glucose spike from coffee?

I've not looked.

Okay, then. Then let's hope you don't. But in some people, it causes a spike, especially in people who feel a bit jittery and anxious when they drink coffee. Here's the study. It showed that if you're tired and you didn't sleep well, you should drink your coffee after your breakfast instead of before. And it can cut the glucose spike of your coffee by up to 50%. And also, I think it makes sense from a cortisol standpoint, if you're exhausted and you just have a bunch of coffee first thing when you wake up, it might be a lot for your body to handle.

So even black coffee can cause a glucose burn?

Yeah, in some people, yeah. And me, it never caused. It didn't prevent me from becoming way too addicted to coffee, but in some people, it causes a spike. Yeah.

Have you stopped drinking coffee, did you say?

Yeah. 31 days ago. I'm, like, tracking the days.

Really?

Yeah.

Why?

Yeah, because it was a habit that I was dependent on, but that didn't serve me. And I knew this for years. Every time I had a coffee, I then didn't feel so good, and I was like, why did I drink that coffee? It just. The crash is really intense for me. My brain is very sensitive to stuff, so it would just make me have a bit of brain fog. I would not think super clearly, but yet every night when I went to bed, I would be dreaming about my fat white in the morning, and it was something I really wanted to solve, and I don't know why. You know, a month ago, I was drinking coffee. I was like, that's it. That's the last one for a while. And then I didn't have one the next day or the next day, and then after five days, you just don't even want it anymore.

And what have you noticed since you've stopped drinking coffee?

It's so much easier for me to fall asleep at night. Like, I just. I just get in bed and within ten minutes I'm asleep. Whereas before, I would think and be in bed and just. Just think about stuff, have lots of thoughts, and just spend an hour awake, essentially. And then my brain works better. I don't have those big bursts of energy where I would get super productive and get all my shit done, but I feel more consistent throughout the day and I feel more like myself. I think that's the biggest part. And I feel proud of myself for having done this. I know it's not a huge deal, but for me, it meant a lot.

I've been trying to drive this coffee conspiracy for so long, and no one will take it.

What's the conspiracy?

I just think it's hailed as this, like, super food and this super, super drink that really has no impact on us other than if we drink it past 12:00, then it's going to impact our sleep because the half life of it is 12 hours. But I just think, like, something that has such a big, clear, positive impact, or at least in the short term of productivity, focus that people are so dependent on in culture must be that's somewhere having equal and opposite cost.

What's weird is that all the studies show that people who drink more coffee have fewer diseases.

I know. It's like.

It's so weird.

How could this be? Because I live by principle, that everything has, like, an equal and opposite cost. I think that's like Einstein's theory of relativity or whatever. I totally butchered that because I've no idea about anything to do with physics. But just this idea that you can't isn't, like, equal mc squared. It's you, basically. I don't know even what I'm talking about.

Massive energy.

Yeah. Like, you can't destroy.

Every force has an opposite effect.

Equal and opposite effect. And so with coffee, okay, if it brings me really, really up and it really makes me focused and productive, then there must be an equal and opposite downside.

So maybe the downside is just you spend a lot of money on it. I don't know.

But it can't be. That's like. It's not like a financial. It's got to be. There's got to be.

Listen, maybe it's just one of those things that's actually not too bad for us. I don't know. I think one of the downsides is that people often put a lot of stuff in their coffee, like sugar, oat milk, things that are not good for you, you know? Oat milk is pasta juice. Anybody listening? Oat milk is not good for you. It's just starch. So maybe that's the downside. I don't know.

I don't believe it. It's got to be, you know, again, looking at all the studies, longevity, health, disease, weight loss, you know, everything it says it's this super thing. But I. Maybe we're not focusing on.

Don't you think it disconnects you a little bit from yourself? Maybe that's the downside, that you're less grounded. You're less in your body, you're a bit less authentically, you, you get bit more like supercharged.

Yeah, supercharged.

Maybe that's why. Maybe that's the downside.

Maybe it is. Maybe people just value the downside.

Totally. Because in our society, we love this stuff. We love just being in our brain and having a big to do list.

How are you dealing with all this attention?

I'm in a good place now, but it was really tough because I'm such a sensitive person. At the beginning, I had no idea what I was doing. I had like a google alert set for my name, and I was getting things every day. Yeah. Nobody teaches you how to deal with this stuff.

True. You have to learn the hard way.

Yeah. So now I protect myself. I don't read anything, and my team filters stuff to me that's important. And all in all, the attention, I just keep coming back to the fact that I believe in what I'm doing. It's helpful, it's easy. I see proof every day that it's helping people. It's scientific. It makes me happy. And so all the noise, you know, all the haters and stuff, you just kind of. It's part of the package, I guess.

I think you're, you know, having met you and spoken to you for a.

Long time on and off we go way back now.

Tell me about it. You are one of the most well intentioned, pure, wonderful people I have ever met. And in fact, when I, when I saw that we were having this conversation today, I think oftentimes it's a good gage of the person, because I was really just excited. It was like, expansive knowing that you were coming here because you're such a beautiful soul and human. And so anybody writing bad things about you, I just think, just doesn't understand who you are as a person. And that's okay. We forgive.

Thanks, Steven. So kind of you to say.

We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question that's been left for you is, tell us about an occasion that comes to mind when a complete stranger did a surprising act of great kindness to you.

Oh, yeah, I know, exactly. It was a year and a half ago. I was in London, and it was just before this book was coming out, and I was in a phase where, you know, when you get burnt out and it's just a lot, and I was like, why am I doing this? I just. I just want to quit. And I got into a black cab. Steven and the driver. I think he was an angel or something. He just looked in the mirror and looked at me and started saying, it's gonna make me cry. He just looked at me. He said, whatever you're doing, it's important. He just said that. And he just said, whatever you're doing, it's important. Like, keep going. And it's so crazy that this stuff happens. There was the universe sending me a message or something. It was definitely, like. I don't know. Yeah. That really stuck with me, because it really felt like a. And I'm a very spiritual person. It really felt like a message from the spirits, you know, trying to help me in this difficult moment. So it was not so much a personal thing somebody did, but it was something that someone channeled that, like, really impacted me.

Why did it matter so much about moment?

Oh, because I go through ups and downs. It's hard. You know, it's hard to drive this idea, this project, by myself and to manage all the people and to care so much about the placement of the fucking broccoli on the COVID of the book. And it's just. It's a lot. It's a lot of stuff that I care about so deeply. And sometimes it just. It just eats at you. It's so much. It's so much. And I think it mattered to me so much when he said that, because it felt like, okay, there's something going on that is beyond what we understand, beyond what science understands. This was a message from the universe. This person had. I didn't say a word, Steven. I didn't say a fucking word. And he said that to me.

Yeah. I mean, it's. What I took from what you said is just how a total stranger saying a couple of words can really have such a tremendous impact.

And I interpret it as like a message from God. But actually. What? Maybe he says that to everybody.

Maybe. But regardless of the fact, there's something so beautiful about how you never really know at any given moment what anyone's going through, and just a couple of well placed words can have such a profound impact in. Just imagine, like, so say, though, this is exaggerating the scenario slightly, but you were really gonna quit. And him saying those couple of words, someone that has no idea whatsoever pushed you to carry on on your mission, and pushing you to carry on on your mission saves thousands and thousands and thousands of people's lives and extends their health span. And all it was was a couple of words. And all of that's going on at all times. In our society, we don't even know the sort of butterfly effect of the impact it's having on people. But we can bet on the fact that it's just better to be kind.

Exactly. And we can bet on the fact that if we want to say something nice to somebody, we should. You know, when you see somebody in the street on crutches or whatever, just say, like, get well soon. That kind of shit is powerful. Just see them, you know, it's just being seen, I think, which is so powerful because you get into your own head.

Jesse, thank you. Thank you so much. I'm very, very excited by your anti spike formula. Very, very excited. And my partner is going to be thrilled when I bring this home. So thank you for that.

You're welcome.

And I highly recommend because this book is so beautiful and it's been such a smash hit all around the world. I think it sold more than 3 million copies or something staggering like that. So congratulations on all your success. Long may it continue. And I have to say, what you're doing is important. So please do keep on doing it.

Thank you. You're gonna make me cry again. You're the worst. You always make me cry.

No, I don't do anything. What are you talking about? Always give me bloody vinegar.

Thank you, Steven. You're good.

Thank you so much. Thank you for being here. I appreciate you. Thank you. Isn't this cool? Every single conversation I have here on the diary of a SEO, at the very end of it, you'll know I asked the guest to leave a question in the diary of a CEO. And what we've done is we turned every single question written in the diary of a CEO into these conversation cards that you can play at home. So you've got every guest we've ever had their question. And on the back of it, if you scan that QR code, you get to watch the person who answered that question. We're finally revealing all of the questions and the people that answered the question. The brand new version, two updated conversation cards, are out right now@theconversationcards.com. they sold out twice instantaneously. So if you are interested in getting hold of some limited edition conversation cards, I really, really recommend acting quickly. Maverick.