The Glucose Goddess – French biochemist and best-selling author Jessie Inchauspé – is on a mission to help people around the world improve their physical and mental health by controlling their blood sugar levels.
‘We are in a sugar crisis – it’s everywhere – and our food, our snacks and drinks are damaging our health, and we don’t even realise it,’ she says in the opening of her new Channel 4 series, Eat Smart: Secrets of The Glucose Goddess, which aired last night.
With over 5 million followers on Instagram, her online hacks around regulating the amount of glucose in your body often go viral. But it was an accident, 14 years ago – when she broke her spine jumping off a waterfall – that piqued her interest in glucose.
‘It left me in a very dark place, physically and mentally – and at some points, it felt like life wasn’t really worth living,’ she says to the camera.
While her back healed following surgery, this life-changing event prompted her to better understand her physiology – so she tried a glucose monitor and started looking more closely at her diet.
In her new Channel 4 series, Inchauspé challenges people suffering from problems ranging from Type 2 diabetes to sleep Apnoea to overhaul their diet and see if following her top “glucose hacks” can help manage extreme blood sugar spikes over a period of six weeks. It’s quite the change from “Instagram influencer” – where she spends most of her time creating online content and writing books. In fact, it’s the first time she’s worked with a group of volunteers face to face.
In the first episode, we meet 27-year-old Ashlee from Bridgend – who has struggled with severe acne since she was 14. Her skin is so bad, she told her boyfriend not to propose – as she doesn’t want to get engaged; ‘Not while I still look like this’.
‘It would be amazing to wake up in the morning and not have acne everywhere,’ she tells Inchauspé.
To prove her methods really do work, Inchauspé looks at Ashlee’s diet – which consists mainly of takeaways, frozen ready meals, chocolate, crisps and cookies – and then, with the help of GP and cook Dr Rupy Aujla, introduces her to simple recipes to help manage blood sugar spikes.
But can her recipes and tips achieve life-changing results for these desperate volunteers in just six weeks?
‘A lot of convenience foods are highly processed,’ says Inchauspé. ‘Meaning, they contain high levels of unhealthy fats, lots of sugar and very little fibre – which aren’t good for us. Not only are they not good for us, when we eat them we leave less room in our diets for more nutritious foods that actually benefit us. So we’re sort of robbing our own health when we eat processed food.’
So far, it all makes sense. After all, it’s not exactly news that eating too much ultra-processed food (UPF) is bad for us.
But Inchauspé has received plenty of backlash online. Namely for selling a supplement on her website – the Anti Spike Formula – for £49.50 a pop, that she claims helps to ‘reduce your blood sugar.’
It’s also worth remembering that sugar highs and lows are a normal physiological response to food. Our body breaks down carbohydrates and uses the sugars to power all our cells and functions. This leads to a short-term change in blood glucose levels, which typically peak about 30 minutes after eating before returning to a baseline after around two hours.
But if you’re looking to prevent them from going really high, then Inchauspé’s hacks offer some serious food for thought.
Jessie Inchauspé’s 5 top (easy) glucose hacks
1. Put clothing on your carbs
When we eat carbs – starches like bread, pasta, rice, potatoes or sugars (that’s anything sweet – from an apple to a slice of chocolate cake) – on their own, Inchauspé calls these ‘naked’ carbs. Clothing, she says, is protein, fats or fibres.
So instead of having a bowl of plain pasta (aka ‘naked’ pasta), Inchauspé wants you to add some chicken, spinach and olive oil to help slow down how quickly the carbs arrive into your bloodstream and therefore slow down the glucose spike.
2. Eat your food in the right order
Inchauspé says that if you eat your food ‘in the right order’ you can reduce your glucose spike of that meal by 75%. According to Inchauspé, the right order is veggies first, then proteins, then fats and carbs and sugars last. ‘Just change the order of your food and you’re going to get a much smaller glucose spike,’ she says.
3. All sugar is sugar
‘I know you might think that having honey in your tea is better than having regular sugar, but when it comes to your glucose levels all sugar is sugar,’ says Inchauspé. Brown sugar, white sugar, honey, agave, maple syrup… it’s all made of glucose and they all have the same impact on our body.
4. Always eat sugar as a dessert, never between meals as a sweet snack
The best time to eat something sweet, says Inchauspé, is after a meal when there’s already food in your stomach. If you have a sweet snack in between your meals, when your stomach is empty, that sugar is going to be released into your blood stream really quickly and create a big glucose spike.
‘If I see a really delicious looking cookie or doughnut throughout the day, I’ll buy it and then save it for dessert after my next meal,’ she says.
5. Stop counting calories
‘Back in the day, to measure the calories in food, you would simply light the food on fire and measure the amount of heat produced by food burning – and that’s how you would get the amount of calories,’ explains Inchauspé.
Counting calories doesn’t necessarily improve health outcomes: ‘If you look just at calories, you could eat a low-calorie but really unhealthy diet,’ she adds. ‘Instead, you should focus on protein, fat and fibre – you’ll feel much better than just counting calories.’
Eat Smart: Secrets of The Glucose Goddess is out now on Channel 4
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