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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, 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, and 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 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, this is what is changing. The scientific community is discovering that not only is this 100 milligrams per deciliter cut-off 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.

We'll 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 milligram 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 milligram 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 you. 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 h, just such a big 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 are 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."

So your body asks your pancreas to send out a hormone called insulin, and insulin's job is to grab the excess 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 e. 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 indicates 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 Al, 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 glucose spikes 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 bike 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 time.