Glucose Spikes: Impact on Health and Daily Life

Glucose spikes can affect health, even without diabetes, leading to various daily issues like organ, skin, sleep, and energy problems.

### The Surprising Impact of Glucose Spikes on Health
* Glucose spikes, previously thought to only affect those with diabetes, have been shown to have **significant negative consequences for overall health**, even in individuals with **normal fasting glucose levels**.
* 📊 The traditional fasting glucose level cutoff of **100 mg/dL** is being challenged by recent research, which found that **80% of participants without diabetes** experienced damaging glucose spikes after consuming a common food like breakfast cereal.
* Glucose spikes can lead to **mitochondrial stress**, increased **glycation** (a form of aging), and **insulin release**, all of which have **long-term health implications**.
* 😴 Symptoms of glucose spikes include **fatigue, cravings, hormonal imbalances, sleep disturbances, and skin issues**, even in individuals who are not diabetic.
* 🔬 A 2018 study from Stanford University, titled "Glucotype: Reveal New Patterns of Glucose Disregulation," was a game-changer in highlighting the **prevalence and impact of glucose spikes** in non-diabetic individuals.
* 💉 People with type 2 diabetes and pre-diabetes should be particularly mindful of glucose spikes, as reducing them can help **manage and potentially reverse these conditions**.
* 🍽 Practical tips to reduce glucose spikes include starting the day with a **savory breakfast**, consuming a **glass of vinegar before carb-heavy meals**, adding a **veggie starter to meals**, and taking a **short walk after eating**.
* 💊 For those who struggle to control glucose spikes through diet alone, there are supplements like the "**anti-spike formula**" that can **reduce the impact of carb consumption on glucose levels**.

I often hear in my work people saying, Oh, why do you even look at these glucose spikes if you don't have diabetes, you should not worry. Well, this scientific study proved us exactly the opposite, that even if you don't have diabetes, you can still be suffering the consequences of these big glucose spikes, and they can be affecting you on a daily basis. They can be affecting your organs, your skin, your sleep, your cravings, your energy. [Music] Etc. Hello angels, and welcome to the Glucose Goddess Show. Today, we're discussing one of my favorite topics, glucose spikes. So, I've made a career, I guess, talking about glucose spikes, and today I want to give you a really deep dive into what they are, how do you know if you're having them, what causes them, and what you can do about it. So, today is all about glucose spikes. Get ready. The first place I want to start with this topic is to ground you guys in this very common notion of glucose levels. So, if you go to your doctor once a

year, they're probably going to be measuring with a blood test your fasting glucose level, and your doctor does this because they want to determine whether your glucose level is healthy, whether you might have pre-diabetes, or whether you might have full-blown type 2 diabetes. You can also help figure out if you have type 1 diabetes, which is an autoimmune condition, but that's the rarer form of diabetes. So, you go to your doctor once a year, they draw blood from your arm, probably - do they ever draw blood from not the arm? I don't know, anyway, probably from your arm, and then you get the results. The result you get is a number, generally a number in the 80 to 120 range. This number is measuring how much glucose is free-flowing in your bloodstream. And why do we measure this fasted? Because after you've been fasting all night, your blood sugar level or your glucose level is not going to be impacted by what you just ate. So, after an overnight fast, after

sleeping. Your fasting glucose level has settled to where it usually is. So in terms of this fasting GL glucose level that you get back, the American Diabetes Association recommends a particular range. So the American Diabetes Association says that your fasting glucose level should be underneath 100 milligrams per deciliter. And that if your fasting glucose level is under 100 milligrams per deciliter, you are healthy and you have nothing to worry about. Now, if your fasting glucose level is between 100 to 110, then that indicates that you have pre-diabetes. And if it's above 120, that indicates you have type 2 diabetes. We'll cover those topics in a separate episode, but here I want to talk about the fact that generally if your fasting glucose level is underneath 100 milligrams per deciliter, your doctor is not going to talk about it. Your doctor is going to say, Oh, you don't have pre-diabetes, you don't have diabetes, you're healthy, no problem, go.

home. See you next year. Now, now, this is what is changing the scientific community. Is discovering that not only is this 100 milligrams per deciliter cutoff not that optimal, but that also, even if you have a normal fasting glucose level, you might still be experiencing glucose spikes. And this is what we're going to talk about today. And to give you an example of my own life, I had a lot of mental health issues when I was a teenager. And, you know, all the blood tests I ever did told me I was normal. My doctors never said I had anything wrong with me. It was kind of difficult to get help and get anything that would help me. But 10 years after my first encounter with these mental health issues, I had the opportunity to measure my blood glucose levels continuously. So, not looking at just the fasting value, the one point in time, but I had the opportunity to wear a continuous glucose monitor that showed me what my glucose actually did throughout the day.

get to that in a second, but that was the key, and it might very well be the key for you as well. So, this 100 milligram per deciliter cut off. And by the way, if you're in a country like the UK, Canada, Switzerland, the unit for your fasting glucose value is going to be slightly different. So, instead of milligrams per deciliter, your result when you get your lab test from your doctor back is going to be in millimoles per liter. Now, these units don't really matter, but the number is going to look different. So, the cut off for a healthy fasting glucose level if you're in one of those countries is 5.5 millimoles per liter instead of 100 milligrams per deciliter. But it means the same thing. It's like comparing kilos to pounds, just different unit systems. Now, very importantly, we used to all believe the scientific community, the medical community, we used to all believe that if your fasting glucose level was underneath 100 milligrams per deciliter, you had nothing to

worry about that. You should not care about your 
glucose level because you probably didn't have   any issues. With your doctor probably didn't 
even remark on your fasting glucose level at all. If it was under 100 milligrams per deciliter. 
And importantly, doctors and scientists used to   believe that if your fasting glucose level was 
healthy. So underneath this 100 milligrams per   deciliter that probably for all of your waking 
hours and your sleeping hours. That all the time. That your glucose level always stayed kind of 
in that range. So you know between 100. Maybe   went up a little bit after a meal but nothing 
extreme. Any doctor would say if you don't have   diabetes. If you don't have pre-diabetes, your 
glucose level is nothing that you should be   worrying about until. Until, ladies and gentlemen, an 
incredible scientific study completely changed the   game. In 2018, a team of scientists from Stanford 
University published a scientific paper that

completely changed everything. Their scientific 
paper is called Glucotype: Reveal New Patterns   of Glucose Disregulation 2018. Here's what they 
did in the study and here's why it's related to   glucose spikes. These scientists took people who 
did not have diabetes, so whose fasting glucose   level was underneath this 100 milligrams cut off. 
Then they gave these people a glucose monitor, same   thing that I had tested, that measured in real time 
what their glucose levels did, so showed them the   curve of their glucose levels. And importantly, the 
scientists asked the participants to eat a bowl of   breakfast cereal, very common food that millions 
and millions and millions of people around the   world eat every single day. So these participants 
ate the bowl of cereal, and the scientists then   looked at what their glucose levels did. They 
probably thought that they would just see a pretty   normal little variation of these very healthy 
people, but what they found completely changed   the game. They found that 80% of the participants 
after eating this bowl of cereal had an increase.

in their glucose levels into a range that was 
previously thought to only be attainable by   people with pre-diabetes or diabetes. Let me say 
that again, 80% of these participants who did   not have diabetes did not have pre-diabetes 
saw their glucose levels go way way way way   way up after eating that bowl of cereal into a 
damaging range that if you had shown this to a   doctor just like that out of the blue, they would 
have said, Oh, this person probably has pre-diabetes   or diabetes because their glucose level went 
up so high after eating this breakfast cereal. So what the scientists saw in the participants is 
called a glucose spike, meaning an increase in the   concentration of glucose in your blood after 
eating. So why does this happen? Well, because   when we eat carbs, so either starchy foods like 
bread, pasta, rice, potatoes, oats, or sweet foods, so anything that tastes sweet from a fruit juice 
to an apple pie or breakfast cereal, by the way.

which is starchy and sugary. Those carbs break 
down into glucose molecules in your digestive system, and then make their way to your bloodstream, 
and there very simply. There's just more glucose in your blood than there was before. So if you look 
at it on a graph like this one, you can see that from a baseline level of glucose that was steady. H 
We see a big increase in concentration of glucose levels. This changed everything because for a 
long time, we thought that if you didn't have diabetes, you shouldn't worry about your glucose 
levels, that if you didn't have diabetes, nothing bad was happening when you ate something, that if 
you didn't have diabetes, nobody ever thought you could be experiencing a spike this big. It truly 
revolutionized the way that we're looking at glucose levels as relevant for everybody. So why 
is this spike bad, and why is it so shocking? Well, a spike this high, so a spike of more than 30 
milligrams per deciliter after eating, increases

inflammation in the body. It increases your risk 
of heart disease, it increases glycation, which is   aging, and it increases your risk of developing 
type 2 diabetes. These spikes accumulate over   time and create pre-diabetes or type 2 diabetes, 
and there's other symptoms as well that they   create, like cravings, fatigue, being hungry all the 
time. They can create hormonal issues in your body,   they can impact your sleep, and so much more. I 
often hear in my work people saying, Oh, why do   you even look at these glucose spikes? If you 
don't have diabetes, you should not worry. Well,   this scientific study proved us EX exactly the 
opposite, that even if you don't have diabetes, you   can still be suffering the consequences of these 
big glucose spikes, and they can be affecting you   on a daily basis. They can be affecting your organs, 
your skin, your sleep, your cravings, your energy, etc.   So, this is a revolutionary paper that has paved 
the way for our understanding of glucose spikes.

so let's do a little deep dive into what exactly 
happens in your body when you experience those glucose spikes, and why they are harmful, and why 
we should try to avoid them. So, the first thing that happens in your body when you experience a 
glucose spike is that your mitochondria, the little factories inside of each of your cells, they get 
stressed out. Your mitochondria are in charge of creating energy for your body. If your mitochondria 
are functioning well, you have a pep in your step, you're excited, you feel good, you have energy to 
get through the day, you can get everything done on your to-do list, you don't wake up exhausted 
in the morning. But if your mitochondria are hurt, stressed out, overwhelmed, then it's a completely 
different story. You're tired, picking up your kids from school is exhausting, going grocery shopping 
feels like a huge ordeal that you don't have energy for, your to-do list is getting 
longer and longer by the day, and you just feel

like you can't have control over your life and 
your time. That is a symptom of your mitochondria   being overwhelmed. So even though your mitochondria 
love transforming glucose into energy, and that's   their job, if you give them a big glucose spike, 
if they see this mountain of glucose arriving   too quickly, they get stressed out, they shut down, 
and they can't make energy as efficiently anymore.   Chronic fatigue. That's the first thing that 
happens in your body when you spike. The second   thing that happens in your body when you spike. 
In order for me to explain it properly, we need to   cover cooking a chicken. So what am I talking about? 
So you know when you put a chicken in the oven and   it goes from pink to brown, well, it has cooked, and 
this cooking process is called glycation. Glycation   is like cooking. Now what's interesting is that 
from the moment you are born as a human being,   you are slowly cooking. I know it sounds weird, but 
it's true. You are slowly glycating from the inside.

out just like a chicken in the oven. For example, when scientists look at the cartilage of babies, it is white. When you look at the cartilage of a 90-year-old person, it is brown. It has cooked, it has glycated, just like the chicken in the oven. And here's another fact: glycation is like aging. Aging and glycation go hand in hand. So from the moment you're born, you're slowly glycating, you're slowly aging, you're slowly cooking. And then when you're fully cooked, you die. Weird, I know, but true. So glycation is happening in your body, aging is happening in your body, and we can't stop it, right? Even though billionaires are trying to stop aging and live forever, we actually can't stop glycation. Right now, we cannot stop aging, but we can slow it down or speed it up. And here's the thing: with every glucose P that you're experiencing, well, glycation is happening faster, so much so that

a very common test to measure the advancement of 
diabetes in the body is called the HbA1c test. This   test actually measures glycation, the glycation 
of your red blood cells. So glycation, aging,   glucose levels, they go hand in hand because 
it is an excess of glucose that is going to   increase glycation. And glucose and glycation 
kind of sound the same, it's because they're   very related. It's because it's the glucose that 
is doing the glycating, and the more you glycate,   the more glucose spikes you have, the more this 
glycation process is happening, and it's going   to show on your face as wrinkles, as molecules of 
collagen get glycated, and also on the inside,   your organs is slowly going to deteriorate. So 
that's the two things that happen in your body   when you spike. Okay, we have mitochondrial stress 
and we have glycation. Now the third thing that   happens in our body when we spike is insulin 
release, so your body when a big glucose spike

arrives your body knows this is not good for 
you. Your body knows that it's going to cause all this damage so it has a technique to get that 
glucose level back down. What it does is that it calls your pancreas. Let me just grab my phone here 
and call my pancreas. Your body goes, Hello pancreas, hey we have a glucose spike happening, could you 
please send out some insulin and get that glucose level down? Okay, thank you so much, see you later, 
Mah Mah. So your body asks your pancreas to send out a hormone called insulin and insulin's job is 
to grab the excess glucose glucose molecules and store them away so they don't cause too much 
harm. Insulin stores glucose molecules away in your muscle cells, in your liver cells, and in your 
fat cells, and that's one of the ways that we gain fat on our body. So glucose spikes have these very 
deep biological consequences inside of your body and then us as humans, you know, we don't feel the 
glycation, we don't really feel the insulin release.

but what we do feel is chronically fatigue. What we do feel is cravings because every time there's a spike, there's a drop afterwards, and that drop activates the craving center in our brain, tells us, Jesse, eat a cookie. So we feel this urge to grab chocolate, we feel this urge to grab coffee because we're exhausted, we feel maybe our skin is getting inflamed because of the inflammation due to the glycation. We kind of have all these symptoms that pop up in our lives physically and mentally that indicate glucose spikes happening with it. So now you understand glucose spikes lead to many symptoms and consequences, and glucose spikes don't only matter for people who have diabetes. That 2018 study showed us that even if you don't have diabetes, it is very likely that common foods are causing glucose spikes in your body and then leading to all of these consequences that we just mentioned. So in summary, who should care about glucose spikes? Well, first

of all people who have type 2 diabetes should care about glucose spikes because in order to reverse their type two diabetes they need to get rid of those glucose spikes so that slowly their fasting glucose level also decreases. Second, if somebody has pre-diabetes, they should also care about their glucose spikes because by reducing the spikes, they're going to reduce the progression of their pre-diabetes and get back into a healthy range. But then for the vast majority of us who do not have pre-diabetes or diabetes right now, we should also care because even if our fasting glucose level is normal. Even if your doctor every year tells you your glucose levels are fine, as the Stanford study shows us, it's very likely that common foods are creating glucose spikes. So what I like to say is if you could feel better than you currently do, if you're feeling sluggish, fatigued, maybe having sleep issues, hormonal issues, maybe menopause symptoms are difficult

maybe you have missed periods infertility maybe you have mental health problems so maybe you have anxiety depression brain fog we didn't cover brain fog we'll do another episode on brain but it's fascinating the connection between glucose spikes and brain fog if you could feel better than you currently do today and if you want to prevent long-term issues tomorrow you should try to avoid these glucose spikes now for the million-dollar question how do we avoid the glucose spikes so I'm going to share with you four of my top hacks to do so and I've Linked In the description of this episode a PDF where you can get my 10 super easy glucose hacks to steady your glucose levels avoid those gluco bikes through food without dieting or doing anything crazy so my four main hacks are have a savory breakfast instead of a sweet one have a glass of vinegar in water before eating something that's high in carbs add a veggie starter to your lunch or to your dinner

and after you eat something that's heavy and in 
carbs, go for a little walk for 10 minutes. Help   your muscles soak up that excess glucose so that 
insulin doesn't have to rush in and do all of the   work. Hey, really quickly if you can't always do my 
food hacks and you want to eat the carbs that you   love with less impact on your glucose levels, 
I created a capsule just for that. It's called   anti-spike formula. You take two before a meal. It 
cuts the glucose spike of carbs by up to 40%. 100%   made out of plants and tested by over 25 clinical 
trials. Link is in the description. Okay, back to the   episode. Thank you so much for being here. That's 
all we have time for today. I hope you loved all   the glucose spike information. Again, click the 
link in the description of this episode to get   my 10 glucose hacks so that you can test this 
out for yourself and see whether by using the

hacks you're feeling better because your glucose 
spikes are reducing. I'll see you next [Music] time.

Glucose Spikes Explained: The Hidden Enemy in Your Life | Episode 2 of 18

By Jessie Inchauspé, NYT bestselling author of The Glucose Goddess Method and Glucose Revolution. 


Glucose Revolution

The Impact of Glucose Spikes on Non-Diabetic Individuals

Glucose spikes can have consequences on organs, skin, sleep, cravings, and energy levels, even for those without diabetes.

Doctors typically focus on fasting glucose levels, but the scientific community is now realizing that normal fasting glucose levels don't necessarily rule out glucose spikes.

Continuous glucose monitoring is providing more insight into individuals' glucose fluctuations throughout the day.

The Impact of Carbohydrates on Glucose Levels

The traditional belief that a fasting glucose level below 100 mg/dL meant no cause for concern has been challenged by a 2018 study from Stanford University.

The study revealed that 80% of participants experienced a significant increase in their glucose levels after eating breakfast cereal, despite not having diabetes or pre-diabetes.

This spike in glucose levels after consuming common carbohydrate-rich foods has challenged previous assumptions about what is considered healthy.

Glucose spikes, even in non-diabetic individuals, can lead to inflammation, heart disease, and an increased risk of type 2 diabetes.

These spikes can also cause symptoms like cravings, fatigue, and hormonal issues, affecting sleep and energy levels.

The experience of a glucose spike stresses out the mitochondria in the body, which are responsible for energy production, leading to feelings of exhaustion and low energy.

Mitochondria become stressed and less efficient at producing energy when exposed to rapid increases in glucose levels.

Glycation, a process similar to cooking, is accelerated by high glucose levels, leading to aging effects on the body.

Glucose spikes also trigger insulin release, which is a key response to regulate blood sugar levels.

Glucose spikes trigger the release of insulin, leading to the storage of excess glucose in the body, which can contribute to weight gain.

These spikes can cause fatigue, cravings, inflammation, and other physical and mental symptoms, regardless of whether a person has diabetes.

Managing glucose spikes is crucial for people with type 2 diabetes and pre-diabetes to improve their condition, but it is also important for those with normal fasting glucose levels, as common foods can still cause spikes and impact overall well-being.

Managing Glucose Spikes: Top 4 Food Hacks

The podcast discusses the connection between glucose spikes and health issues like anxiety and depression, offering four main food hacks to steady glucose levels.

These hacks include having a savory breakfast, consuming vinegar before high-carb meals, adding a veggie starter to meals, and taking a short walk after carb-heavy eating.

For those unable to follow the food hacks, there is also a recommended "anti-spike formula" capsule to reduce glucose spikes from carbs.