The Reason You're Tired, Foggy & Craving Sugar at 3pm — Blood Sugar & Insulin Resistance Explained

Welcome back to the Being Brigid Show. Today we are going to dive into an extremely important topic, which is a blood sugar masterclass where I'm pulling together 4 of the most powerful interviews with 4 incredible experts in the field of nutrition to help you better understand how blood sugar is associated with nearly every aspect of our health, from day-to-day symptoms like mood swings, fatigue, and cravings to long-term risk of disease like increasing aging in your cells and how exactly that happens. We're going to talk about the science of blood sugar spikes versus blood sugar dips and the things that are within your control to be able to prevent them. This is our 50th episode, and I thought that this was such an amazing way to celebrate, taking you deeper into the topic that I care the most about, which is blood sugar and decreasing insulin resistance. If this is helpful for you to better understand things that you can do, or even helpful for friends of yours that you can send this to, to say, here's exactly where you can start— this episode is something that I wish I could hand to every single woman and every person as a whole who has ever been told, oh, your labs just look normal, or just lose weight with the calories in versus calories out approach, or, oh, it's just your hormones. There is so much more to the story than that, and blood sugar is at the heart of so much of that. So we are going to get into it, starting out with the incredible holistic nutritionist Kelly Levesque. This is going to be a sneak peek from our upcoming episode that will release in the next few weeks.

I will say that blood sugar saved me. Blood sugar balance saved me. Understanding the science of blood sugar was something that freed me from food drama. I spent the end of high school and all through college reading every single diet book and trying to make those diets happen in those years. Like, oh, I'm gonna do South Beach, I'm gonna, you know, they were Atkins, low carb, this. But once I understood the science, I felt free to eat what I wanted, go out to restaurants, know what would make me feel energized, calm, regulated, and like, have all my cognitive faculties as well. And so what was interesting to me was my senior year at USC, I took a course called Nature of Human Health and Disease in which I had like a final project thesis I had to present on type 2 diabetes. So I really started to understand all of the macronutrients, what they broke down to in the body, and how they either drove cravings and crashes and burnout or how they supported sustainable energy throughout the day. And calmed hunger hormones and balanced sex hormones. So I feel so indebted to that class because it sent me on a trajectory away from business and finance, even though, you know, I run a big business now, towards nutrition. And called my dad in tears, Dad, I need to be a registered dietitian. I need to be a doctor. And he was like, good luck to you, honey. That ship has sailed. You gotta graduate. So I spent years after I graduated in cancer and genetics, I went back to school for nutrition and sat for a clinical nutrition board exam. And so I'm a certified clinical nutritionist, holistic nutritionist. And, um, and blood sugar became really the foundation of the work that I do and what I teach. And so what's so fascinating about blood sugar is that, um, you have your 3 macronutrients. You have— and you've talked to your audience and your community about this forever, but, um, protein—

pretend like they know nothing.

Okay, so if you know nothing, um, you should know that you have 3 macronutrients. You have protein, you have fats, and you have carbohydrates. And when you eat those things, they are digested by stomach acid and enzymes into something. And it's just like the— you're breaking them down into individual units. I always imagine a brick wall, and like, if you were eating protein and the protein was like a piece of chicken or steak, and that's a brick wall, and you're chewing it and digesting it, your enzymes and your hydrochloric acid dissolve the mortar, and you're absorbing each brick unit by unit, which are amino acids. And your body is made of 20 different amino acids. And your body takes up each of those bricks and puts them together into different forms of walls. And that makes up your collagen, your ligaments, your tendons, your muscles. It makes hunger hormones, it makes regular hormones, it makes neurotransmitters. Like, proteins make everything in your body. Like, they are the building blocks. And, um, they start You know, they— anything, any proteins that you eat, because it's an essential macronutrient, we have to get it from our food. So even if someone is vegan, fruititarian, like pick the most fringe diet on the planet, like it doesn't matter who you are, if you are human, you must eat protein to get those amino acids to make all the things in your body, those building blocks of everything. And so, um, what's cool about amino acids is they're not going to have the— a direct effect on blood sugar. If you were to have a steak, you're— it's not the same as having a piece of bread or even like pineapple or, you know, all that. Well, and we'll get to carbohydrates. So because they're breaking down to amino acids, those amino acids come into your bloodstream and they're distributed to your body and rebuilt into different things. So amino acids regulate the majority of our hunger hormones. When we are eating enough protein, we feel satisfied. We are regulating hunger hormones like ghrelin, which I call the gorilla hormone, and neuropeptide Y. There's now dozens of hunger hormones screaming at us to eat. And you know what's interesting is we have nerves that innervate our gut that are searching for essential amino acids, and they're searching for fatty acids. And and our body feels calm and relaxed when we're getting what we need. And that makes sense. Think— if you think about it, like, I need amino acids to survive, then there's going to be mechanisms that are searching for— it's checks and balances that those are arriving in your body and you're able to heal, um, you know, perform at your best, stay balanced, build muscle mass, and feel energized. So I love protein. I think it's made an amazing comeback, but it doesn't have a spike and crash in the same way as carbohydrates. So protein breaks down to amino acids. Then you have fat, fat, which breaks down to fatty acids. So you can think about things like avocado, olive oil, coconut oil, you know, nuts, the fat in eggs like egg yolks, fat, fat on grass-fed beef. The most famous, your own, you know, your omegas, omega-3 fats from salmon, sardines, all that good stuff. So fat breaks down to fatty acids. Fatty acids are also essential. We know that, um, you know, if you've heard of Fatty 15, even we just discovered a saturated fat, pentadecanoic acid, which is an essential fatty acid. Then you know you have your omegas like 3, 6, and 9, all essential for our body to get our hands on these fats, um, so that we can survive. Again, you have essential amino acids, you have essential fatty acids, but fat breaks down to fatty acids. It has no effect on blood sugar. And this is, you know, when people go ketogenic, for example, and their diet is mostly fat, their blood sugar is pretty flatlined. And a lot of times there's no— very little blood sugar available to them, and their body starts actually even burning fat for fuel instead of sugar. So protein breaks down to amino acids, fat breaks down to fatty acids, and then you have this bucket of carbohydrates. And carbohydrates, there's a vast, um, you know, variety of the different types of carbohydrates that we can have, but a lot of things fall into this category: vegetables, fruit, grains, beans, and then anything processed from grains. You're thinking cookies, cakes, flours. And so when you think about that first bucket of vegetables, fruits, whole grains, beans, those are called cellular carbohydrates. Cellular cellular carbohydrates are wrapped in a fiber cell, so you actually have to chew through them to digest them. And they have a lot of fiber present in them, meaning that they have less, what would be like, glucose. So what's so cool is that all carbohydrates break down to blood sugar, but the speed at which they break down is based, and how much is present is based on their composition. So you have your cellular carbohydrates, which are whole foods, and you have your acellular carbohydrates. And these are things that have been processed out of their fiber cell. So you can think about like orange juice, for example. That's really easy to picture. An orange, it's all wrapped in fiber, but when you squeeze it and the juice is in a cup, that is the fastest spike and crash in blood sugar because there's nothing holding it back. You sip that orange juice, it goes into your stomach. There's no digesting of the quote-unquote mortar here, right? It's just, it's hitting you like a freight train. It's being absorbed through your epithelial lining in your gut. It's going into your bloodstream, and that you can picture that orange juice just flooding your bloodstream. So your blood sugar is actually going up as it's digested, and that is the, you know, like the fastest, quickest increase in blood sugar. And your blood sugar goes up based on the quantity of orange juice you're drinking. So not only is it the type, but it's also the quantity. So you're drinking that orange juice, the blood sugar— your blood sugar is going up. Your body releases a hormone called insulin from your pancreas. Insulin's job is to pick up that orange juice and put it away. It's going to put some in your liver, it's going to put some in your muscles, and then if there's excess in the bloodstream, your body will look to package it into a triglyceride and store it as fat. So it's that, that process of that up and down. But if you look at that whole category of carbohydrates, you know, people will bucket it and be like, carbs are bad for you, go low carb. But there's such a drastic difference between processed acellular flour-based crackers like rice flour crackers versus rice. And, you know, rice is pretty dense in carbohydrates. It has, you know, high glycemic index. The quantity of carbohydrates per serving size is high. But there is a difference between those flour-based rice crackers and rice itself just in its structure.

That was Kelly Levesque, an incredible nutritionist who has worked with so many different celebrities, from Jessica Alba to Chelsea Handler to so many others. And I want to sit with something that she said for one second. She said that blood sugar balance freed her from food drama. And this is something that I see over and over again, is that blood sugar balance is able to decrease the food noise, help you feel more in control of the food choices that you're making, and it's an approach that helps you stop white-knuckling. You can actually understand your body and what's happening physiologically, which is the freedom that comes with blood sugar. And that's exactly what we're going to get into deeper with our next guest, Jesse Enchowski. Jesse Enchowski is also known as the Glucose Goddess, who has created a following with millions and millions of people in sharing the science of glucose graphs and comparison graphs where she shows the fact that orange juice versus a whole orange has different blood sugar effects, and so many other tips that help you understand easy changes you can make in your life to start to feel better. This was from our episode, April 28th, Top Glucose Hacks Every Woman Should Know. Here's Jessie. Let's start off with just having you share why it's important for people to care about managing their glucose spikes and not being on the blood sugar roller coaster, even without prediabetes?

It's a little bit like asking, why is it important to brush your teeth even if you don't have cavities? Managing your glucose spikes is something we do to feel better every single day and also to prevent long-term issues. So if you learn how to manage your glucose levels early on, you can help reduce the risk of getting prediabetes and type 2 diabetes. Which, by the way, you know, more than a billion people in the world now have either prediabetes or type 2 diabetes. So it's quite a big deal. And also, glucose spikes on a daily basis affect us more than we think. So symptoms such as cravings, chronic fatigue, where you need a coffee mid-morning, mid-afternoon, brain fog, mental health issues, hormonal imbalances, such as a lot of testosterone in a female body, which might lead to PCOS, such as very difficult menopause symptoms, hot flashes, insomnia, skin conditions, acne, psoriasis, eczema, all inflammatory-based conditions. They all can be related to having dysregulated glucose levels, even if you don't have diabetes. And there was one study that really reshaped our understanding of glucose for people who don't have diabetes. It came out of Stanford almost years ago now, and it showed that in people without diabetes, eating some common foods such as breakfast cereal could send their glucose levels into such high ranges that are clearly damaging, that are clearly very inflammatory, ranges that previously we thought were only attainable if you had diabetes. So now we understand, even without that medical condition, you can still be experiencing a very intense roller coaster on a daily basis that affects how you feel. And so what I like to say, Brigid, is if you could feel better than you currently do, then you should learn to manage your glucose spikes because truly it'll help you feel better within an hour and also help whatever health issues you might be experiencing.

And this is so important for people who normalize feeling bad because I think like when you say it in that way of if you can feel better, why wouldn't you take the actions needed where some people think, oh, I'm, I'm doing fine. Like, there's, there's nothing wrong with the way that I'm living until you start to feel better and you're like, wow, I just unlocked the most insane competitive advantage for every aspect of my life as a mother, as in work, in my relationships, the energy that I have to clean my house, like literally every single aspect.

Totally agree. I listen, I used to think that I was just somebody who had a lot of cravings and I used to think I was just somebody who was tired and I used to think I was just somebody who had irregular periods. And you kind of hear this narrative that it's normal to have all these symptoms and it's normal to struggle. And of course, you know, to some extent it is, but it turns out that a lot of the symptoms that we feel on a daily basis might actually not be just symptoms to suppress or ignore or medicate. They might actually be messages from our body telling us there's something that we need to look at within. And for a long time, I wasn't ready to look at those messages from my body. So I kind of ignored them and suppressed them. And then coinciding with my discovery of glucose, I felt finally ready to, to look at them. And by managing my blood sugar levels, I was able to create a sort of solid first step of the foundation of my health system, body and brain. And it's truly life-changing.

It's so unbelievably life-changing. And I'm just feeling so energized having this conversation with you, like visibly seeing this in myself, in you, in so many of the people that are in our communities where you see these results from people where they're like, I I, I cannot believe how much of an impact this had. So I remember in 2019, or it was 2020 maybe. Um, yeah. That a friend of mine, Kayla Barnes, she and I had been wearing continuous glucose monitors and I had been using them when I worked for Dr. Hyman and all of the patients that we saw. And she had shared your Instagram account with me, like back in the day when you were very early on and was like, look at how amazing this is. She's comparing these different foods. So that was really a huge part of you communicating the science. You created a, a software to be able to take these graphs. Tell us, in posting comparison graphs where you take one food and show the glucose response, and then you take another food and you show the glucose response, what were some of those eye-opening posts that you remember like going viral because people could not believe the glucose response from one food versus another?

Well, first of all, I will say at the beginning, nothing was going viral, girl. It was just me on my couch posting to my 10 followers. But the ones that garnered the most attention, I think, one of the first ones was when I compared a whole orange versus the juice of that orange. So basically a whole piece of fruit versus fruit juice. And you could see the fruit juice created a much bigger glucose spike than the regular piece of fruit. And this was really my first creation that when I showed it to my friends, my family, and my 10 Instagram followers, I got a real response. People saw visually the difference. And I thought, oh my God, this is such an incredible educational tool. So that was the first one, not the most viral one. I think in terms of the most surprising ones is probably the French fries versus vinegar and French fries. And the UK, they have this thing where they put white vinegar on French fries. And when you put vinegar on carbs, it reduces the glucose spike of those carbs. Because vinegar contains acetic acid, which is a really cool molecule that just simply slows down the digestion of the carbs. And so when you see this visually, it's very striking. It's really, really fun. What other ones do I like? I think the food order ones are also pretty cinematic in a way. And what I'm doing, Brigid, by the way, just to be clear, is that I'm looking at scientific studies, peer-reviewed studies that show that a specific habit, nutrition traditionally reduces the glucose spikes in healthy people. And then what I do with my graphs is I just illustrate that established science. So for example, the food order information, amazing scientists have found that when we eat vegetables at the beginning of our meal, it reduces the glucose spike of that meal versus eating the veggies at the end after the carbs, for example. So easy swaps, for example, broccoli and then spaghetti versus spaghetti and then broccoli, create a wildly different glucose spike, even though it's the exact same food and the same amount of food that we're eating. So I think that's a really, really popular one. And then—

For that one, can you explain like how the fiber helps to slow down that glucose absorption?

Absolutely. So let's say you're faced with this meal, okay, broccoli and spaghetti. And so if you eat the broccoli first and then the spaghetti, you're going to get a much smaller spike than if you do the reverse. And the reason for that is broccoli, like all vegetables, contain fiber. And when you have fiber at the beginning of your meal, it has time to sort of create a protective mesh in your upper intestine and your, your lower stomach. And this mesh is almost like a little shield that stays in place for a few hours that slows down how quickly glucose molecules from the rest of your meal can go into your bloodstream. So it's slowing down the absorption of the glucose from the meal into your bloodstream. And the slowness is really the important piece here. What we're trying to do is we're trying to slow down the speed at which glucose arrives in our blood because that is the way that we slow down the symptoms. That's the way that we create less of a shock and less of a stress in our bloodstream. That's how we create less inflammation. That's how we also create less of a crash because with the smaller spike, you get a smaller crash and that crash triggers cravings and hunger. So it's all about the velocity. You're kind of a, you know, you're a time master with your glucose spikes. It's all about, okay, I'm gonna eat the carbs, but how slowly can I get them to arrive into my bloodstream? That's really what the glucose hacks that I share try to do.

I love it. And I think even with you talking about how you use the science and then create the graphs. I, I have seen pushback. We even get pushback sometimes because we will test recipes on a continuous glucose monitor and show the graph to our members, and we'll get pushback being like, that is not a science-backed way to understand, since every per— you know, there's over 40 factors that impact glucose response, and every individual has their own unique response. What would you say to, to criticism like that, that traditionally comes from conventionally trained doctors.

Oh, well, I think they're absolutely correct. We, you and I, Brigid, would never have the same glucose spike if we ate the same food. This is completely normal and everybody will have a different spike. But if you and I both did the same hack, for example, if we compared your cookie spike and my cookie spike, they would not be the same spike, right? One would be bigger, one would be smaller. But if we both had vinegar before that cookie, both of our spikes would be proportionally smaller. So your vinegar and cookie spike will be smaller than your cookie spike, and my vinegar and cookie spike will be smaller than my cookie spike. So as long as we're focusing on the habits that have been scientifically proven to work on everybody, that's all that matters. We're not here comparing spikes. We're here to give advice that's going to make everybody's spikes smaller, however big or small your original spike You see what I mean?

100%. Yes.

Yeah.

And I think that it's also important to, to discuss the fact that science is always evolving. And so sometimes it's, you know, there's always going to be opposition to newer studies that have come out that maybe doctors weren't trained on in medical school, which is why, you know, people are not getting this information in their doctor's office even when they have prediabetes or type 2 diabetes. Like we've had a ton of pushback even from clients that we work with, or in the early days when I was working with Levels and interpreting CGM data from Levels users. You know, we got tons of pushback from people who were requesting CGMs initially from their doctor who were saying, you know, giving you a con— prescribing a continuous glucose monitor for you with prediabetes would be like me telling you that you should get chemotherapy for a non-cancer tumor that you have. And it's like, no, those are not comparable scenarios at all.

Oh, yeah, no, that's, that's not comparable. It's sort of like, if somebody told you, well, you can walk. So why are you exercising? It's like, well, yeah, I can do something. But what if I could, you know, live a more optimal life and be even more optimally healthy? It's sort of interesting, because it's this whole conversation about prevention. And often we get pushback from people who say, "Don't worry about preventing diabetes. We'll deal with it if you one day have it," when really it would be so much better for our healthcare system and for everybody in the world if prevention was something that people were also excited about. So what's the point of giving a glucose monitor to somebody who has prediabetes? The point is that's going to teach them how to not get diabetes.

And reverse their prediabetes, which is entirely possible. Completely. And a lot of people are told that it's not, but we see it every single day, as I know that you do as well.

Of course. Of course. Yes, that's a big myth also that diabetes is not reversible, that prediabetes is not reversible. But again, as you say, you know, it's the issue that we see between conventional medicine, but whose job it is to just prescribe medication, and the role of, I guess, other people to help with prevention and reversal. It's very different jobs. And I think sometimes we think doctors have a lot of expertise on everything, but truly they're really good at diagnosing and treating, and prevention is not something they spend a lot of time learning about, and reversal.

Yes, yes, yes, I completely agree. Um, okay, and then one other thing that I'd love to get into before then we switch gears and get into the new focus that you have with your new research findings is around glycation. Can you explain the role that blood sugar spikes have on glycation?

Yes. So glycation is what happens when you put a chicken in the oven. It goes from pink to brown. It basically cooks. And that process of cooking is called glycating. Now, here's where it gets really interesting. From the moment a human being is born, he slowly glycates. We slowly cook from the moment we're born until we die. And we know this because you can look at the cartilage of babies and it's white. And by the time you're 90 years old, your cartilage is brown. It has browned. It has cooked like a chicken in the oven. And this is happening every second of every day. And glycation is actually similar to aging. We cannot stop aging. We cannot stop glycation, but we can speed it up or slow it down. And so concretely, what does glycation do? It damages substances in your body. And this can show on your skin. For example, when your collagen gets glycated, you get more wrinkles. And internally, as your organs slowly glycate, they become more diseased and less healthy. And glycation and glucose kind of sound like the same root. And that is because they do have the same etymological root, because it is glucose, that does the glycating. So in your body, more glucose that you have, the faster you are glycating, the faster you are aging. And so very simply put, what does this mean? It means that when we learn to manage our glucose spikes and we reduce how much glucose we're eating, we are slowing down glycation. And this is really cool because it means we are slowing down on aging. Now, I'm not saying that by using the glucose hacks you're going to look 20 years younger in a week. That's not the point. But over decades and decades and decades, it adds up. And theoretically, if you had fewer glucose spikes than your neighbor, when you're 80 years old, you might have fewer wrinkles than your neighbor if everything else is the same. So that's glycation. It's very interesting.

It's so interesting. And I think that it helps when people understand. I remember working with a client many years ago and trying to help with reducing added sugar and wearing continuous glucose monitor and sharing an episode that you did around glycation with trying to be like, these are the reasons that when you have the impulse to have, you know, the lots of snacks in the evening, late at night, and other things that you're trying to break the habit around, that having the information, the science to really understand the implications of those choices, um, and the impact that that can have in really changing your lifestyle and, and the things that you thought might be worth it, but really when you think about your long-term goals are not. I love the way that Jesse breaks down these complex topics into concepts that are very easy to understand. And I wanna highlight that this is not about fearmongering. This is about empowerment. This is coming from an empowered place of having an understanding about how you can feel today, but then also the way that you can prevent diseases that will happen decades from now. And those changes start with the changes that you're making today. Our next clip is with Dr. Sarah Berry, one of the leading nutrition researchers in the entire world and a scientist whose work that I have been sharing with my community for years. I am obsessed with Dr. Sarah Berry and all of the research that she's done on glucose, on the microbiome, on women's hormones, on menopause, on so much more. Her episode was incredibly popular, episode 27, Why Calorie Counting is Failing Women. Blood Sugar and Menopause Science with Dr. Sarah Berry. I'm going to take you into an incredible clip from that episode. Here's Dr. Sarah Berry.

We've done research where we've shown that if you consume, for example, a white bagel on its own or white bread on its own, what happens is, is that whilst you might be consuming something that on the face of it is low calorie because you're just consuming, you know, maybe 100 grams of carbohydrates, but you get this short, sharp rise of circulating blood glucose that then dips 2 to 4 hours after. And you actually go on to consume, on average, if you have a dip at breakfast like that, from consuming just carbohydrates, about 300 calories more than if you were to have with that carbohydrate some additional protein or some additional fat. And we've done this research where we've asked people on one day to have a bagel or toast on its own or with low-fat spread, and then we've asked them to come in the next day and the next day in— this is done actually in random order, but on the other occasion to add either cheese, which which is high in protein and fat, or to add in a nut butter, which is high in protein, fat, and fiber. So they're adding extra calories at their breakfast, but actually that prevents that blood sugar dip. It prevents that feeling of hunger that you get when you have that blood sugar dip. And actually it means that over the day, although they're having more calories at breakfast, they go on to consume less food over the duration of the day because they're having a more balanced blood sugar. They're not getting these like hangry hunger signals what was driving them to, to get that quick fix. And so I think that really shows how often opting for low-calorie foods, which often involves low-fat foods, actually is totally counterproductive, because all that happens is you feel more hungry later in the day and you go on to consume more.

I love all of the work that you do. I am, um, just such a fan of all of the nutrition science that you've put out and how you've legitimized so many of these principles of eating whole foods and caring about blood sugar balance and thinking more in depth about foods than just the surface level of how many calories they have, because you are one of the leading nutrition researchers in the world. And the fact that you have these research trials, these research studies, like you're talking about this in particular, you know, I remember when it came out a few years ago and sharing it within my nutrition programs because of how significant it is that it's, it's about thinking about how blood sugar impacts those— that increase in hunger that you can have, the hunger and the cravings that happen when you're on that blood sugar roller coaster throughout the whole day. Can you, um, zoom out for a second and explain in a basic way how this works mechanistically?

Yeah, so when you consume a carbohydrate-rich meal, what happens is you have a short-term increase in circulating blood glucose. It typically peaks around 15 to 30 minutes after consuming the meal. This is what everyone seems to be fixated on— these blood sugar spikes. Oh my God, they're going to kill us! No, they're not. That's a normal physiological response to consuming carbohydrates, to have an increase in circulating blood glucose. We do not need to flatline, despite what you hear from some influencers. It's absolutely normal to have these increases in circulating blood glucose. What we don't want to do is have really big, so excessive peaks day in, day out. And one of the reasons we don't want to do that is because quite often what can happen is, is you can have what we call an overshoot in insulin, which causes a blood sugar dip a couple of hours later. So when you consume that carbohydrate, as your blood sugar increases— so your blood glucose increases in your blood— you release a hormone called insulin. And insulin's role is to remove the glucose and put it where it should go in the body, whether it's the muscles, liver, and so forth. And what you can sometimes have what we call an overshoot in insulin. So you're releasing a bit too much insulin, which causes then you to have actually a dip in circulating blood glucose. It goes below your normal baseline values. Now, it's not a dip to the extent that we, you know, a type 1 or type 2 diabetic might experience, where they're going into a dangerous hypoglycemic dip. But it is a dip that still affects us physiologically. And when you have this dip, it typically occurs 2 to 4 hours after consuming carbohydrate, particularly if you're consuming on its own without fat, protein, or of fiber. And what our research has shown is that this dip causes this feeling of hunger. It also reduces your feeling of energy. It reduces your feeling of alertness. And people who have this dip go on to consume their next meal 30 minutes sooner. They go on to consume about 100 calories more at their next meal and go on to consume 320 calories more over the day. But where I think it gets really interesting, and kind of it brings it back to you as an individual, is when we've done studies where we've intentionally given someone a breakfast that we know will cause them to have a dip, so that high carbohydrate, that bagel or that white bread, and then the next day we say, okay, come back and we want you to have a breakfast that isn't gonna cause you to have a dip. So it might be matched in carbohydrates, but have that extra protein, fat, or fiber. What we see is if you have a breakfast that doesn't cause you to have a dip, you go on to consume less calories that day than when you have the breakfast that causes you to have that dip, 'cause you're not going on that rollercoaster. And it's those dips that I think we don't talk about enough, that we're so preoccupied with these glucose spikes that actually it's the dips that are driving excess calorie intake that cause us and some people to feel, you know, hangry. And, you know, some people feel shaky, some people get brain fog during that period. You know, we all talk about the post-lunch slump. Well, actually, for most people, it's because they're having this small dip in circulating blood glucose. Some people it doesn't affect, some people never seem to get them, but we see a large proportion do actually experience these.

And then that's when they're jumping to the, to the pick-me-up, the caffeine or that next, like you're talking about the, the meal or the snack that's happening sooner or the sugar that they're trying to like pick up their energy. And I'd be interested because I run a program called the Blood Sugar Reset that we've had 25,000 people go through. And the top 3 symptom improvements that we see are improvements in energy, mood, and cravings with stabilizing blood sugar. Is that what your research shows also, or is it different in the symptom improvement?

Absolutely. We haven't looked at cravings per se, but what our research shows is absolutely those dips are associated with increased reduction in alertness, increases, um, in calorie intake, reduction in feelings of energy, and also reductions in, in your mood. So, you know, a poor mood. So if you can stabilize that, then, you know, it would stand to reason that yes, you would also see those improvements, which— and that's why I think it's really important that we don't just think about the spike, we think about what's happening with the dip, and that we make sure we just go back to simple healthy eating principles where we're not buying all of these low-fat, you know, meals, or, you know, where we just make sure we build simple balanced meals that have some carbohydrate, have some protein, have some fiber, and have some healthy fats in them.

Dr. Sarah Berry has such an incredible way of explaining the science of blood sugar, but she's also a researcher that's in the is who's actually doing that work. When I asked her at the end of the episode if she could share her Instagram and where people can find her, she didn't even know what her Instagram handle was. It took her a few seconds to get it right. And that's also how you know that she really knows what she's talking about. That in addition to the fact that there were several times throughout the episode where she responded to my question saying, you know, I don't know for sure. And I think in this world where people who are, who are not experts positioning themselves as experts are so quick to say, oh, this is the answer, it increases is the trust that I have in her when she's able to say, I'm not quite sure because I'm not personally conducting that research, but this is what I think that it is. That's also why I have such an appreciation for our next guest, Dr. Tim Spector. Dr. Tim Spector is one of the top 100 scientists in the entire world. He's the founder of Zoe Nutrition. His work has been so incredibly innovative in bringing science to these topics of the way that the gut microbiome impacts our blood sugar, and 30+ plants or more per week, and understanding the way that insulin resistance can increase inflammation, and so many of the things that his research studies that incorporate hundreds of thousands of participants have been able to bring to light over these last few years. I truly believe that he is one of the greatest pioneers in the entire space of nutrition, and he found that symptom improvements—energy, mood, reduced hunger—they happen before lab markers even change when a person is changing their diet. That really signals to me that your body starts to feel these changes. These, these feelings, these symptoms can be warning signs before the blood work is moving in the wrong direction, and they can also be signals that you're on the right track when you're making changes, that you start to notice those symptom improvements with fairly quickly. So without further ado, we will get into the episode clip from Dr. Tim Spector. His episode was from March 24th, Eat This Way for Better Gut Health. Number one gut microbiome doctor, Tim Spector. In the research that you've done, which is vast— you are one of the top 100 scientists and one of the leading nutrition scientists in the world— and in your research, you found that when you take people away from these foods, you change their diet to a more whole foods diet that's based on the ZOE model that you've created, that you notice specific symptom improvements before actual changes to the lab markers that you're looking at or the gut microbiome. Can you share what are these three symptoms, and why is it so significant that the symptom improvements happen before the lab changes?

Obviously, when we started these ZOE studies, um, back about 8 years ago, uh, we were doing the largest dietary intervention studies in history, really, and no one had really looked at many of the things we were looking at. So it wasn't like people had looked and not found it, they just hadn't had sufficient numbers. The average nutrition study, as you know, usually based around 20 students in a nutrition unit, you know, in a college somewhere getting credits for taking part for a few weeks and very young, very healthy, and just usually measuring blood uh, things like blood lipids or, or something like that. So the idea of actually following people intensively and finding out how they were feeling or getting a whole, you know, range of symptoms was really unknown until we did these studies. And the first very basic study we did, 1,000 people, giving them identical meals, showed this tenfold difference in blood parameters, um, in blood sugar or blood fat. That was the Predict 1 study. Um, then subsequent studies we did with larger numbers of people, we, um, we changed their gut microbes from towards a healthy state, either by mainly by firstly by changing their diet, giving them our prebiotic, our Daily 30, which is 34 freeze-dried plants, or asking them to take fermented foods 3 times a day. So we did, these were like 3 vast citizen science projects, you know, involving hundreds of thousands of people. And we asked them to track how they were feeling every day. And it turned that within a week, half of— approximately half of the people in the active arm of these studies reported having an improvement in their mood, their energy, and reduced hunger in that time. And these are all brain effects that really, I think, doctors, nutritionists were not trained to ask about. Um, it just wasn't in our training training. And this brought home to me how important this gut-to-brain axis is and how sensitive our guts are to these feelings. So that's why we think it's particularly important that even before we saw changes in inflammation or a drop in cholesterol levels the brain is much more finely attuned to what's going on in your gut and your body. And I think we just need to start listening to our own bodies, but also in, as health professionals, start making, having these sort of discussions with our patients. Because I think people don't realize this really close link between what you eat and how you feel. And even symptoms like fatigue and loss of energy, people have just said, "Well, that's just life." They've never linked that to, "Well, maybe if I just went on the Zoe diet or I just took some prebiotics, I could change that." And it's only when you start thinking about it and start thinking, how do I feel 3 hours after a meal? Feel that you can, you can make progress. Because if you don't think about it, if you don't ask it, the doctor doesn't ask it, your, you know, your, your nutritionist isn't into that short-term element of it, you, you could miss that huge benefit and, and not, and be focusing on things like blood sugar or weight or some of those more traditional parameters that we're all more comfortable with. So, To me, that's been the revelation of, you know, particularly in the last year as we're getting some of these big results back, is how important that self-reported feeling is that, you know, in the past we might have dismissed as chance or placebo effect.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. So this is so fascinating to me because of how people are conditioned to think about nutrition, where if they're not losing enough weight they're like, "Oh, this must not be working." And so it reframes every way that we think about food to say, just because you haven't lost weight yet or that you haven't improved your blood sugar markers yet doesn't mean that physiological changes aren't actually occurring. And that if we can pay attention to how you're feeling in response to changes that you're making, it's a signal to your body that you are on the right track, which I think is point number 2, is the importance of being able to be in tune with your symptoms and being able to identify that as progress. And point number 3 from that to me is that when we think about inflammation, most people attribute it to joint pain as being that primary indicator. But as you've said, if we start to shift in thinking about mood swings, depression, and fatigue, as primary signals that inflammation is happening underneath the surface, then you can understand how intervening and improving those symptoms may actually prevent you being on a downward spiral that leads to the onset of inflammatory conditions 10 years later. Because we know that things like type 2 diabetes and different autoimmune diseases and cancer and Alzheimer's disease, that they don't just it's not a flip that switches where you're diagnosed and, and that's the same time that the onset happens. It's not an overnight process. It's decades in the making. And so if we could be more in tune with our bodies to say, wow, these, these things are shifting, cuz you never know what you prevent when you prevent it, that you're able to then identify, oh, this could be me actually stopping chronic disease decades before actually having the onset of a diagnosis in my doctor's office.

Office. Yeah, no, that's absolutely right.

And that is the science of blood sugar from 4 incredible experts: Kelly Levac, holistic nutritionist; Jesse Enchauspe, founder of Glucose Goddess; Dr. Sarah Berry, an incredible researcher and clinical professor; and Dr. Tim Spector, who is one of the top 100 scientists in the entire world. I care so much about sharing the science of blood sugar, but I also want to help take you deeper into making these changes and guiding you through what a blood sugar balanced meal plan can actually look like, we are running our next round of the Blood Sugar Reset. This is a program that we've had more than 29,000 people go through in order to improve their energy, mood, and cravings, starting to learn and implement the science of blood sugar balance, where I lay out the exact meals, I formulate the meal plan that help you improve your health in a very short period of time and truly feel the difference of eating a blood sugar balanced plan that it's optimal compared to just a quote-unquote healthy plan. So I'd love for you to join us in this upcoming round of the Blood Sugar Reset so we can help you improve your energy, mood, cravings, improve your insulin sensitivity, and decrease your inflammation. I lay out the exact meals that everyone follows for the 7 days. We have the shopping list, we have the modifiable meal plan that you can adjust based on how many people you're serving, we have a swaps bank, we have daily live coaching calls with me where I go deeper into the science of why you're making the changes that you're so that you can make these habits stick long term. You can join us in the blood sugar resets by going to beingbridget.com/blood-sugar-reset. Again, that's beingbrigid.com/blood-sugar-reset. We'll also have all the information in the show notes below. If you're interested in listening to any of the full episodes from the guests today, we'll also link to those episodes. And stay on the lookout for an incredible episode with Kelly Levesque, holistic nutritionist, all about blood sugar balance, food freedom, creatine, magnesium. And she really takes us behind the scenes of how she's created the successful wellness company that she has built over these last 10 years. I am so grateful to her as a human being. Also, of course, she's a wealth of knowledge, but, um, she gets super vulnerable in this episode in a way that I've never heard her share before. So that episode will be launching in the next few weeks. I'm very excited for you to tune into that as well. If this episode was valuable for you, or you think that one of your family members or friends could benefit from hearing this message of blood sugar balance and is feeling stuck in the conventional way of thinking, please share this episode with them on Apple, on Spotify, on YouTube. Please subscribe to the show and leave a rating or review. All of that makes such a difference for the show and this mission that we're working towards. Thank you so much for joining today, and I'll see you next time.