Dr. Steven Gundry – Jessie, it’s great to have you in person here. Thanks for making the trip out to California.
Jessie Inchauspe – Thank you, Dr. G, for having me.
Dr. Steven Gundry – It’s nice to meet you. Congratulations on your success, that’s fantastic.
Jessie Inchauspe – Thanks. Thanks so much. Yeah, it’s funny how blood sugar became a thing.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Who would’ve guessed, right? As the audience knows, I’ve written multiple books about the mitochondria and metabolic health. So today’s conversation topic is actually one of my favorites as well. So you, yourself, have written these best sellers. How in the world did you get interested in these topics?
Jessie Inchauspe – Well, nobody in my family has diabetes. I don’t have diabetes. So getting so passionate about glucose was not obvious. My health journey started when I was a teenager. I had an accident, and I broke my back jumping off a waterfall. And, you know, physically I recovered after a big surgery. But then mentally I started developing a lot of issues, anxiety, depression, depersonalization. I could never be alone. I was always stressed out that at night my heart was gonna stop. Basically, my nervous system was completely shot. And I realized at a young age, if you don’t have your health, you don’t have much. So I went on a sort of journey to try to find my health back and try to figure out how I could help myself and how I could improve my mental health. That led me to finish my degree in mathematics and go to biochemistry for grad school. And then I worked in genetics for five years in Silicon Valley. Spoiler alerts, genetics did not teach me much about what to do to improve my mental health, right?
Dr. Steven Gundry – True.
Jessie Inchauspe – But as I was there, I discovered the world of glucose. I had the opportunity to put on a glucose monitor, a continuous glucose monitor as part of a pilot experiment. I didn’t think anything would come of it because, again, I was taught, you know, diabetes equals glucose problem. If you don’t have diabetes, you don’t have any glucose issues. But I learned something amazing with this monitor. I learned that the days where my glucose levels were more variable, so spike, drop, spike, drop, spike, drop, my mental health was worse. In the days where my glucose levels were steady, I felt better in my brain and in my body. And that’s how the passion began.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Wow. So once, again, many innovators, it’s usually a personal health issue that kinda started the process. So that’s fascinating. All right, so let’s bring listeners up to date with the basics. I want you to remind people what the heck is glucose, and why people are might be facing a glucose problem.
Jessie Inchauspe – So glucose is your body’s favorite or preferred source of energy, okay? And every single cell in your body uses it for energy, from your brain cells, to your finger cells, to your liver cells, to your toe cells. And as human beings, the way that we give glucose to our body is generally by eating, by eating starches like bread, pasta, rice, potatoes, oats, et cetera, or sugars. So anything that tastes sweet from a banana to a slice of chocolate cake. Now, you might think, okay, if glucose is energy, I should eat as much glucose as possible to give my body as much energy as possible.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Makes sense.
Jessie Inchauspe – Makes sense. Well, actually, that’s not the way it works. And you have a lot of really nice plants here around your studio. And if you own a plant, you know that the plant needs some water to live. But if you give the plant too much water, it dies. The human body is similar. Some glucose, fantastic, too much glucose and problems start happening. And some American studies show us that even if you do not have diabetes, you can still be giving too much glucose to your body on a daily basis and experiencing what we call glucose spikes. So rapid increases in glucose concentration in the body. And these can lead to lots of different symptoms from increased brain fog to cravings, to mood disturbances, to fatigue, et cetera. Notably, they impact your mitochondria. We’ll get to that. But, essentially, steady glucose levels, steady blood sugar is a pillar of health. If you’re on a glucose rollercoaster, it’s gonna be really hard for you to feel well.
Dr. Steven Gundry – All right, so I’ve been preaching the importance of metabolic flexibility. Normally, the mitochondria that make ATP from glucose can switch from burning their preferred fuel, which is glucose, to burning free fatty acids or even ketones. And that ability to make that switch usually happens at night, hopefully to most of us. But one of the things that was a real revelation to me is that 50% of normal weight individuals don’t have metabolic flexibility. And 88% of overweight individuals don’t have metabolic flexibility. And 98% of obese people can’t make the switch.
Jessie Inchauspe – And that means you’re hungry all the time. And if you don’t eat every three hours, you feel lightheaded. You think you have, you know, low blood sugar. And I have a lot of people who used to carry snacks in their purse everywhere they went, because to try to combat this low blood sugar and this lack of metabolic flexibility, yeah.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Yeah, no, you’re absolutely right. And I think you go back and forth between Paris and New York for a number of years, and I’m sure you’ve seen a major difference between American eating habits and French eating habits.
Jessie Inchauspe – Yes, but, you know, in France, people’s health is getting worse. And metabolic flexibility is not a given. So last week I was actually on this TV show in France, and it was a very long filming session. We were on set for like 3.5 hours just sitting at a table. It was a big talk show. And the woman next to me after 2.5 hours, she looks at me, she’s like, “Are you feeling what I’m feeling?” I’m like, “What?” She’s like, I’m so lightheaded. I need a snack.” And I was like, “Aha, you’re not metabolically flexible.” I was fine, I was burning fat. I was not particularly hungry, you know? But if you’re not used to switching, God, days can feel very, very difficult if you don’t have food every few hours.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Yeah, that’s absolutely right. So, and your books are a lot about this as are mine. How do you overcome this problem?
Jessie Inchauspe – Yeah, how do you study your glucose levels?
Dr. Steven Gundry – Yeah.
Jessie Inchauspe – The first place I went when I saw I had glucose spikes, I was thinking, “Oh man, does this mean I can never eat carbs ever again because I want steady glucose levels?” And that didn’t sound very fun to me because I love chocolate, I love pasta, and I didn’t wanna go totally keto. That felt like something that wasn’t gonna be very enjoyable for me. So I started to ask myself, “Is there a way that I can eat carbs, the stuff that I love with less impact to my glucose levels?” And that’s where my research began into the studies, and I found in the scientific studies that there are some principles, some techniques you can use in your day-to-day life, to eat carbs that you love with less of a glucose spike. And that’s really where I focused. So in my first book, “Glucose Revolution,” I have 10 hacks. In the second one, I focus on the four most important ones. And as you use these, you’re gonna reduce the spikes in your body, the glucose spikes, retrain your mitochondria to go to burning fat for fuel. You’re gonna study your hunger hormones, improve your body and your brain. And, to me, this was completely life changing. And, today, whether you’re dealing with type 2 diabetes or fertility issues or skin problems or sleep issues, using these hacks is going to help. And so that’s really why I do what I do.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Let’s go back. People think about sugar and table sugar, sucrose, is half glucose and half fructose. And they’re very, very, very different compounds. And they behave extremely differently even when we eat them, and even in the way they’re absorbed. So I’ll put on my contrarian hat for a second. And one of the things that has intrigued me through the years is there’s a diet that became popular in the United States. It’s actually still popular, called the Duke rice diet.
Jessie Inchauspe – What is it?
Dr. Steven Gundry – Basically, all you eat is rice. You ever heard of it?
Jessie Inchauspe – Okay, no, never. You just eat rice?
Dr. Steven Gundry – All you eat is rice.
Jessie Inchauspe – Okay.
Dr. Steven Gundry – And it dramatically makes you lose weight.
Jessie Inchauspe – Nothing else, just rice?
Dr. Steven Gundry – Just basically rice.
Jessie Inchauspe – Wow.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Yeah, I mean, you can have a few vegetables. The foundation is plain rice.
Jessie Inchauspe – Interesting.
Dr. Steven Gundry – And just so our listeners know, a starch is just chains of glucose that are stuck together. And the more complex those chains of glucose are in a starch, normally the harder it is for our digestive enzymes to break it into glucose and absorb. So there are human studies comparing the effects of eating glucose versus eating fructose. Very different. And it’s always been of interest to me that the Duke diet of just eating rice, how in the world could that work? Because all they’re doing is eating glucose.
Jessie Inchauspe – Well, if they’re switching from eating sugars, so sucrose, to just glucose, it’s dramatically better for your health.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Yes, say that again.
Jessie Inchauspe – Eating starch is dramatically better for your health than eating sugar. If you want to eat a snack, it’s much better to eat a starchy snack than a sweet snack. And I try to explain to my readers that in starches there’s just glucose, but in sugars there is glucose and fructose. And that makes it way worse for you. Way, way, way, way worse for you. Now, unfortunately, today, and my work rests upon visualizations of our glucose levels. So I use glucose spikes to illustrate the hacks. We cannot easily visualize fructose spikes or insulin spikes. So glucose is incomplete. And if you were just focusing on your glucose levels, you might see that, for example, rice and a cupcake create the same glucose spike. And you might think, “Oh, they’re the same for my body.” But they’re not, because something sweet will have an invisible, if you want, fructose spike as well, which is way worse for your body.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Yeah.
Jessie Inchauspe – Than the glucose alone.
Dr. Steven Gundry – And fructose is a great mitochondrial poison. And just to get off track for a second. A number of years ago, great apes had a genetic mutation that they were no longer able to make urokinase that would break uric acid into a harmless substance. That was a wonderful thing for them because they could take fructose, and turn it into triglycerides and uric acid. And it turns out they could out compete as climate change came other monkeys that didn’t have that defect.
Jessie Inchauspe – Fascinating.
Dr. Steven Gundry – So they could gain weight in the summer by eating fruit and out compete the other monkeys who couldn’t gain weight by eating fruit. We happen to carry that mutation. And I have to keep reminding people that in the good old days-
Jessie Inchauspe – It was great.
Dr. Steven Gundry – It was great.
Jessie Inchauspe – Yeah, absolutely.
Dr. Steven Gundry – It was fabulous. And we only had fruit in a very short time period.
Jessie Inchauspe – You know what else was great in the good old days? The fact that eating something sweet released dopamine in the brain.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Yeah.
Jessie Inchauspe – That was great, right? Because it told you, “Oh, if it’s sweet, eat as much you as you can.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Exactly, yeah.
Jessie Inchauspe – But today it’s a nightmare because you’re being manipulated by all of these ultra processed foods that are releasing dopamine into your brain. And it’s really hard to control yourself. It’s very addictive.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Yeah, absolutely. In fact, I was listening to a YouTube of Alessio Fasano, who you might know is a leaky gut researcher at Harvard, and he’s a GI gastroenterologist. And he gives this lecture and he says, “When strawberries were only available two months out of the year.”
Jessie Inchauspe – What a concept.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Yeah, and you look forward to it, and you only got them for two months. He said, “They have these things in January that are called strawberries.”
Jessie Inchauspe – They’re actually gross. They don’t even taste that good.
Dr. Steven Gundry – No.
Jessie Inchauspe – They’re just cold and watery.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Yeah, and sugary. Folks, this is a really, really hard concept to grasp. Glucose, the stuff we eat as a starch, particularly a difficult to digest starch, is not the evil empire. But you’re right, sugar, which is glucose and fructose, is really mischievous.
Jessie Inchauspe – However, what I find is that glucose is a really helpful window through which to enter improving your food habits. And if you think about your glucose spikes, you’re also naturally gonna reduce your sugar intake because glucose and fructose go hand-in-hand, right? It’s really difficult to find fructose on its own. So if you’re focusing on I wanna reduce my glucose spikes, as a result, you’re also gonna reduce sugar. For example, my first and most important hack I teach people is to have a savory breakfast instead of a sweet one, right? And that is removing the fructose from your first meal of the day, which is so helpful.
Dr. Steven Gundry – All right, define a savory breakfast.
Jessie Inchauspe – So a savory breakfast is a breakfast built around protein, okay?
Jessie Inchauspe – So a good portion of protein, it can be animal protein, it can be plant protein. I love having dinner leftovers. So the leftover chicken or fish or whatever from the night before. You can have some starch in your breakfast for taste. So, for example, you might have a little slice of sourdough bread, some potatoes, et cetera. But most importantly, nothing sweet in the morning, except if you really want some, some whole fruit. But, again, for taste, right? What you wanna avoid is a breakfast that is pure starch and sugar. For example, oats with honey and a banana, right?
Dr. Steven Gundry – Right.
Jessie Inchauspe – Pure starch and sugars, glucose, fructose, big glucose spike. If you really love sweet taste in the morning, have for example, an omelet, and then have an apple, but a whole apple. Because when you transform a piece of fruit, then a lot of problems start happening. So no fruit juices, no gems, no cereal, no muesli, no granola, et cetera, no , no smoothies. But if you really want something sweet, a piece of whole fruit.
Dr. Steven Gundry – I’m glad you brought up smoothies. Americans don’t eat enough fruits and vegetables, and everybody knows that. The Center for Disease Control knows that. I was recently assailed on a podcast, how dare I tell people not to have a smoothie.
Jessie Inchauspe – Really?
-Dr. Steven Gundry Oh yeah, because what a wonderful way to get your fruits in.
Jessie Inchauspe – To get your fruits in. Well, the problem is, okay, there’s a couple things about fruit. First of all, people identify some fruit with something being natural. They’re like, “Fruit is natural, so it’s good for you.” The fruit that we eat today is not natural.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Oh, thank you for saying that.
Jessie Inchauspe – Yeah, so the oranges we find today, the bananas, the strawberries, they’re completely different from the ancestral pieces of fruit we might find in the past. So, for example, if you look at an ancestral banana, it’s very small, it’s full of seeds, it’s tart, it’s not sweet. In the same way that humans bread gray wolves into chihuahuas for fun, right, to create a breed that they enjoyed. They have bred fruits and vegetables through thousands of years of selective breeding. And so, today, our bananas are the chihuahua equivalent to the ancestral gray wolf for the ancestral banana. So that’s the first thing to remember. The fruit we find today is not natural. However, if you want to eat something sweet, a piece of whole fruit is still the best thing to choose because whole fruit contains fiber and water. So, yes, there’s fructose in there. Yes, there’s glucose in there, but the fiber is gonna slow down the impact of that on your blood. Now, the problem arises when you denature that piece of fruit, right?
Dr. Steven Gundry – Bingo.
Jessie Inchauspe – You use smoothie it, you pulverize the fiber particles, you juice it, you remove the fiber entirely, you dry it, to remove the water, et cetera, et cetera. Then you’re just concentrating the sugar molecules. And it doesn’t matter if those sugar molecules came from an orange and are in orange juice, or if they came from a beet root and are in a can of Coca-Cola. To your body, it’s the same molecules. So we have to be super careful and keep repeating this message.
Dr. Steven Gundry – You hear that folks? Yeah, you’re right. One of my favorite expressions is eat whole foods, but eat them whole. There’s no smoothie machines in the San Diego Zoo. There’s no juicers, they eat things whole. But you’re right, our fruit, it doesn’t even resemble anything anymore.
Jessie Inchauspe – It’s a human invention, it’s a creation. And actually oranges didn’t even exist in nature.
Dr. Steven Gundry – That’s right.
-Jessie Inchauspe They have been just made up, it’s amazing.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Yeah, i actually, I used to live in a community nearby here, Redlands, California next to Loma Linda, and Redlands invented the navel orange. Yeah, and literally it was a cross.
Jessie Inchauspe – I thought they were invented in China, oranges, maybe a different group.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Yeah, a different breed.
Jessie Inchauspe – Oh cool.
Dr. Steven Gundry – The navel orange was invented in Redlands, California.
Jessie Inchauspe – Fascinating, there you go.
Dr. Steven Gundry – And you’re right, it was an invention. It was hybridized for sugar content.
Jessie Inchauspe – Exactly.
Dr. Steven Gundry – And now we have Cara cara oranges, which are just pure sugar. And, of course, we were designed to seek out sweet taste. 60% of our taste buds are sweet receptors.
Jessie Inchauspe – Yeah, and people often confuse, you know that feeling when you get when you eat something sweet, a sort of rush, it can be confused for energy. You might think that’s energy. It’s not energy, it’s dopamine, right? It’s the pleasure molecule. And that’s also quite difficult to understand. When you eat sweet foods in the morning, you’re not getting energy, you’re getting dopamine, but your mitochondria are suffering within.
Dr. Steven Gundry – All right, now another thing that you talk about, which is very important is when we eat sugar or even glucose or even protein, we squirt out a hormone called insulin. Let’s talk about insulin, and let’s talk about insulin resistance. Why is that kind of the one-two punch of this?
Jessie Inchauspe – Well, first of all, insulin tends to get a bad rep, but it’s actually vital, right?
Dr. Steven Gundry – Absolutely.
Jessie Inchauspe – For people don’t have the ability to produce it if they don’t inject it, they will die. So when your body experiences a glucose spike, there are a few processes that take place that are not very good for you. So mitochondrial damage, glycation, inflammation, et cetera. So your body knows that if there’s a big glucose spike happening, it should try to get that glucose level down. And so what it does is that your brain calls your pancreas and is like, “Yo, we got a big glucose spike. Can you grab this extra glucose and store it away?” And so your pancreas sends out insulin. Fantastic hormone. And insulin grabs extra glucose and stores it away in your liver and your muscles and your fat cells, okay? And that’s fantastic because it gets that glucose level down. Now, the problem is that over time, as your body produces more and more insulin to deal with more and more glucose spikes, you become resistant to it. It’s a little bit like the first time you drink a cup of coffee in your life, you are awake for 48 hours. That stuff is strong. You’re like, “Whoa.” And then three months later, all of a sudden you’re drinking 10 coffees a day just to stay awake because you’ve become habituated to it. Your body has become resistant to the caffeine. In the same way, you can become resistant to the insulin, right? And that’s a problem because when insulin levels rise too much and you’re too insulin resistant, it can no longer do its job of grabbing the extra glucose and storing it away. So then your glucose levels start to rise dangerously. And that’s what’s called type two 2 or pre-diabetes. But actually, it’s a spectrum, right? It’s insulin resistant spectrum from normal metabolically healthy to all the way to type 2 diabetes. And that’s really something we wanna try to reverse, insulin resistance.
Dr. Steven Gundry – All right, so what are the hacks to do that?
Jessie Inchauspe – In my second book in the method here, I focus on four most important ones. So the first one is a savory breakfast. We’ve covered it. The second one might sound a little bit strange. It’s vinegar. So a tablespoon of vinegar in a big glass of water before one of your meals a day. Do you know what molecule is in vinegar that has this effect on glucose levels or no?
Dr. Steven Gundry – Well, I’m a big fan of vinegars, and I love acetic acid.
Jessie Inchauspe – Exactly, and so acetic acid slows down the breakdown of starches in your stomach. And as a result, when you have this vinegar drink before a meal, it can cut the glucose spike of the meal by up to 30%. So week two of the method, I introduce vinegar into your days once a week, oh, once a day, sorry. Week three, the hack is called the veggie starter hack. That means once a day before a meal begin the meal with a plate of vegetables. Why? Because vegetables contain fiber. And when we have fiber at the beginning of a meal, it’s gonna slow down gastric emptying. And so just slow down the speed at which any glucose molecules will arrive into your bloodstream. And then final hack of the “Glucose Goddess” method is after one of your meals a day, use your muscles for 10 minutes. So you know how I explained that your muscles are a place where insulin stores extra glucose? Well, your muscles, as they contract, they need energy. And the first place they look is in your bloodstream. They look for glucose molecules. And so we can use this to our advantage. If you go for a 10-minute walk, if you dance in your living room, if you even do just some simple calf raises, whatever movement and muscle contraction you can do is gonna soak up some of the excess glucose from your meal. So savory breakfast, vinegar, veggie starter, movement. And after four weeks of that, you’re already on a much better glucose situation.
Dr. Steven Gundry – You may not know this, but I’m actually the inventor of the fake Coke, the YouTube phenomenon where you put some balsamic vinegar in Sanpellegrino water. And I invented that in my first book.
Jessie Inchauspe – Wow, no way. That’s amazing.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Yeah, the fake Coke is mine. Also, as I write about in the new book, “Gut Check,” acetic acid is one of the short chain fatty acids that’s actually essential for our gut bacteria to manufacture butyrate, which is the holy grail of short chain fatty acids. The other thing that I’ve written about way in the past is, particularly in Europe, people take a walk after a meal.
Jessie Inchauspe – Exactly.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Right?
Jessie Inchauspe – Exactly.
Dr. Steven Gundry – And there was a really cool study long ago asking people to either take a 10-minute walk before the meal or a 10-minute walk after the meal, kept the calories the same. The people who walked before the meal actually gained weight and the people who walked after the meal lost weight. Exactly what you’re saying.
Jessie Inchauspe – I love that study, it’s very interesting.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Yeah, it’s really cool.
Jessie Inchauspe – And, you know, the walking after eating, yes, it’s a cultural habit. But actually look at the other hacks. They’re also, you know, habits. For example, vinegar, it’s in every single kitchen in the world.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Yep, exactly.
Jessie Inchauspe – It’s around, we know that it’s a health ingredient. Veggie starters, I mean, in France, in the Middle East, they eat herbs by the bunch at the beginning of a meal. The salad with the vinegarette, you know, to start a dinner is so common in Europe.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Yeah.
Jessie Inchauspe – This is not groundbreaking stuff. It’s just showing scientifically why our habits are so good for our health.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Yeah, in fact, fidgeting is really good for you. And fidgeters actually are in general much thinner than non fidgeters.
Jessie Inchauspe – Really?
Dr. Steven Gundry – Yeah, and there’s a really cool study, which you’ll like, is it turns out our calf muscles are really good at absorbing blood sugar, glucose.
Jessie Inchauspe – Yeah, the soleus muscle.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Yeah, the soleus. And there is a really cool study.
Jessie Inchauspe – It’s Andrew Huberman who started talking about this.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Yeah.
Jessie Inchauspe – So if you do these calf raises after a meal.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Yeah, we’re gonna do calf raises the rest of the time.
Jessie Inchauspe – For 10 minutes now.
Dr. Steven Gundry – But yeah, I mean, who would’ve guessed? But, right, scientifically, this is a really useful muscle.
Jessie Inchauspe – Isn’t that interesting?
Dr. Steven Gundry – It’s the muscle we use when we’re walking. It’s very cool. So if you’re at your office and you can’t go for a walk or dance somewhere and you’re in a meeting, just do some calf raises under your desk, nobody will be able to tell, and you’ll be reducing your glucose spike. Secret to magic. So if you guys, you know, on the next podcast, see me doing this, I’m not being impatient with my guests or I don’t have to go to the bathroom. I’m just getting my glucose-
Jessie Inchauspe – Another thing on the fidgeting, I recently learned that if you’re scared on a plane and there’s a lot of turbulence, if you sort of dance on your feet like this as the plane is moving, it becomes less scary and you feel the turbulence less. So there you go.
Dr. Steven Gundry – What great hacks. Speaking of hacks, you may or may not know, I am not a big fan of break fasting early in the morning. I like to postpone the break fast. And I agree with you that we really should have a savory break fast. What do you think of time restricted eating as a piece of this puzzle?
Jessie Inchauspe – The same hack applies whatever time your break fast is, whether it’s at 6:00 AM or 2:00 PM. The first meal needs to be savory because after you’ve been fasting, your digestive system is very empty and anything you eat on that empty stomach is gonna go right through to your bloodstream. So whatever time that is, you should do it. You should do a savory first meal. In terms of the time restricted eating, I think we’ve seen a bit of a swing back. There was a huge, huge, huge push for it a few years ago. Now, people are understanding that it might not be always the best thing to do. We have to remember it is a stressor on the body. So if you are a female, and it’s a particular time of the month where it’s difficult and you work out and you have a stressful job and your kids and cold plunge and sauna and la la la. Maybe also fasting 18 hours a day is not necessary for your body. It can be a lot of stress. I love doing fasting when I’m on vacation, for example. And I’m kind of chilling and I’m like, oh, I’m gonna do that little hormetic stress on my body because it’s gonna feel good. But I don’t think you need to do it in order to be healthy. It’s a tool to use if it feels good to you. But, to me, it’s not a requirement. It’s more important to eat three times a day in a really healthy good for your glucose way than eating only for six hours a day, but eating a lot of crap. You see what I mean?
Dr. Steven Gundry – Well, for one thing, I advise all my female patients who are in the childbearing years that this is probably a really dumb idea, if particularly they want to get pregnant. And we’ve seen that in my practice as well. On the other hand, I am impressed with the data that came out of the NIHA few years ago. There were two competing studies of calorie restriction in rhesus monkeys out the University of Wisconsin and the NIH. And they showed that calorie restriction definitely improved health span, but only one of the two studies showed increased lifespan. And a researcher at the NIH said, you know, when we’re controlling what animals eat, we’re putting out food on a controlled basis. And I think the reason that these animals do well is because when you’re calorie restricted, you’re really hungry. And so when the food comes out once a day, you eat it very quickly. And so they’re fasting much longer. So he decided to do this in rats. One bunch of rats got fairly high sugar diet. The other bunch of rats got a fairly high protein diet. But both groups of rats, they controlled the time of eating. And for some of these rats, it was about a two hour window of eating. Long story short, in this study, it didn’t matter whether they ate sugar or protein.
Jessie Inchauspe – Wow.
Dr. Steven Gundry – It mattered how time restricted they were in terms of longevity.
Jessie Inchauspe – Interesting.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Interesting.
Jessie Inchauspe – I think one thing we can learn for sure is that if you take some of this information and apply it on a very basic level, for example, snacking between meals should be avoided. It’s always better to have, you know, three meals a day, then six meals a day, for example. But then how far do we apply this? Yeah, it’s an interesting ongoing experiment, I guess, right?
Dr. Steven Gundry – Yeah, I write about the Italian cyclist study where they were put on a training table where everybody had to eat the same thing for three months. One group had a 12-hour eating window Where they ate breakfast at eight o’clock in the morning, lunch at one o’clock, and had to finish dinner at eight o’clock, 12-hour eating window. The other group had a 7-hour eating window. Kept the calories the same, the training was the same, everything was the same. Only the 7-hour window group lost weight. And what impressed me is their insulin-like growth factor 1 dropped, the other group didn’t. I spend my career getting people’s insulin-like growth factor 1 lower as they age. Nothing wrong with insulin growth factor when you’re 30. But when you’re old, whatever that means, you want to get it lower.
Jessie Inchauspe – And have you found any studies on this in females? Because I know a lot of stuff has been done in males in terms of time restricted feeding.
Dr. Steven Gundry – I think the problem, again, with females is that, well, our energy sensor is mTOR, and you are blessed with a more sensitive mTOR sensor than men because you’re actually designed to carry enough fat to bring a baby to term, if the day you get pregnant, there’s a famine and you’re not gonna eat.
Jessie Inchauspe – Yeah.
Dr. Steven Gundry – And I think we ignore that too much, particularly in females. I take care of a few female Olympians, and they are very thin. And they have very regular periods or none at all. And one of them in particular wanted to get pregnant, and I forced her to gain 10 pounds. And lo and behold she got pregnant. I think you guys, your biology is designed to reward you for having some extra body fat stores.
Jessie Inchauspe – Yeah, absolutely.
Dr. Steven Gundry – And I don’t think we all have to go back to the Rubenesque figure, but, you know, the earth mother figure of ancient cultures is a very robust looking female. And I think there was a reason for that.
Jessie Inchauspe – But the obsession with thinness in females and, you know, we’ve been blasted with messages from the day we’re born, basically, it’s so toxic, it’s so difficult. It’s really, yeah, we need to change this. And I think just the obsession with losing five pounds, losing five pounds before the summer. Wow, what a way to control women to make them obsessed with, you know, going from thin to extra thin. It’s just unnecessary.
Dr. Steven Gundry – So what do you think about fake sugars? I mean, no calories sweeteners.
Jessie Inchauspe – Yeah, no glucose spikes.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Yeah.
Jessie Inchauspe – Listen, okay, so, so many things to say about this, and so much controversy these days about aspartame, et cetera. Sweeteners, there’s a spectrum of them. Some of them seem to be better for our health than others. That being said, even if you look at the “worst” sweeteners I believe they’re still gonna be better for you than regular sugar. So I would never tell somebody who drinks diet Coke to start drinking regular coke because it’s natural and it’s better for them. No, but you laugh. But the problem is, with all this demonization of sweeteners, a lot of people are doing that. They’re like, “Oh, aspartame is gonna give me cancer, therefore I should drink Coke with real sugar.” So I really wanna help people avoid that change. We should not go from, you know, a sweetener to real sugar. That being said, should you try to avoid sweeteners? Yeah, why not? But there are some new ones that seem to be actually beneficial. So we were talking about allulose earlier, which is super interesting. And you were telling me that you had a patient.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Actually, yeah. On one of my, I’ve done on Instagram posting about allulose, specifically, non GMO allulose folks. And a viewer wrote in and basically said, “Look, my mother was 72 years old. And I heard your video, and I put her on three teaspoons of allulose per day. And she’s a good sport. She was a diabetic, she was injecting insulin twice a day, and now she is off of insulin and she has normal blood sugars. And thank you for that great trick.”
Jessie Inchauspe – So how does allulose work exactly?
Dr. Steven Gundry – Allulose actually got the first FDA approval as a prebiotic sweetener. And I think that in itself is important because as I write in “Gut Check,” so much of what’s happening to us is because our microbiome is a desert wasteland, And it should be this incredible tropical rainforest. And they should be eating a lot of the starches that we eat, particularly resistant starches. And they’re not there anymore for one thing. So I think giving these guys something to eat is a really good thing. The other thing that’s been shown in human studies is that it will reduce blood sugar spikes. And I, for years now, have been putting allulose in my black coffee. Not because I want it sweet, but because it’ll bring down blood sugars. And Ben Greenfield talks about his experience with that. And so I think it’s actually a real observable phenomenon. I think David Parmiter has called it nature’s Ozempic, which might be a little powerful.
Jessie Inchauspe – Does it act on GLP-1?
Dr. Steven Gundry – It does act on GLP-1 because it actually stimulates bacteria to make GLP agonists. And, again, to me it all comes back to you got the right bacteria, everything gets a whole lot better. Speaking of which I love what’s called the gut centric theory of hunger. And there was a cool experiment in China a few years ago taking volunteers and putting them on a 14-day water fast. One group, nothing but water. The other group nothing but water, but they got 100 calories a day of soluble fiber. Unabsorbable by us, but feeding the gut bacteria.
Jessie Inchauspe – Cool.
Dr. Steven Gundry – That group had no hunger.
Jessie Inchauspe – Ah, yeah.
Dr. Steven Gundry – And the other group, for a few days at least, were really hungry. I like that because, and I’m sure you’ve seen this in yourself and your studies, if you give the bacteria what they need to eat, they text message the brain saying, “Hey, all good down here. We got our needs met. You don’t have to go look.”
Jessie Inchauspe – The other way also happens. So if you give your bacteria way too much sugar or things that are gonna create an overgrowth of the bad ones, you feel super hungry. So sometimes I’m going to a nice dinner or whatever, and then I’m having a lot of cake in the evening, a lot of sugar, like something very sweet. And I wake up in the morning with painful hunger pangs, which I usually never get. And I’m like, that’s my gut bacteria for sure. There is no other reason than I ate way too much sugar last night.
Dr. Steven Gundry – All right, everybody wants to know, since you’re French, how do you guys get away with eating all of these carbohydrates like a croissant, like a baguette, and remain thin? I mean, come on.
Jessie Inchauspe – The French paradox?
Dr. Steven Gundry – Yeah.
Jessie Inchauspe – I think the vision of the French diet is a little bit wrong. So, yes, I mean, there is bread, but also French people buy fresh produce every single day. They cook at home, they eat together, there’s no seed oils, there’s very little junk food. We take time to eat. We’re not watching TV as we’re eating. So you could focus on like how are they eating croissants and staying thin. But you could also focus on the fact that, oh, look at all these other behaviors that they’re exhibiting that are causing the health. I think that’s an important differentiation. We do a lot of healthy things, and, yes, we also eat bread and croissant, but that’s not really the point for me. The point is all the other stuff.
Dr. Steven Gundry – You bring up a really good point with that. There are no preservatives. You go get your croissant every morning. You go get your baguette every morning.
Jessie Inchauspe – You go get your vegetables every day. They’re in every single neighborhood. There’s 10 different places where you can buy fresh produce on the way back from work. You just stop by the, you know, you go to the cheesemonger, you buy some cheese, you go to the produce guy, you buy some asparagus, you go to the butcher and then you go home. Everybody does that, you know? The big supermarket chains are not as prevalent. We have small little local producers, and we go there every day. So the quality of the food is very different.
Dr. Steven Gundry – I think in my first book I wrote about this rather humorous. We were in Paris where we spent a lot of time, and we had a very early morning flight back to the States. And so we talked to the concierge and said, you know, “Could we get something for breakfast at four o’clock in the morning, and maybe some croissants?” And he looked at me and my wife, he said, “Oh, monsieur, I could not do that,” he said, “because it will not be available.” I said, “Well, yesterday’s.” “Oh, monsieur.” He was apoplectic that I could even ask for such a thing.
Jessie Inchauspe – You have to wait until 6:00 AM until the boulange opens. You can’t have yesterday’s croissant.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Woo.
Jessie Inchauspe – Yeah, everything is fresh.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Exactly, and, of course, you know, we make this bread that will last for years. because of the endocrine disruptors-
Jessie Inchauspe – And all of our bread is sourdough as well, by the way.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Well, you know, it’s actually fermented.
Jessie Inchauspe – Yeah, actually fermented.
Dr. Steven Gundry – I mean, actually fermented. And we talked off camera, you don’t have much glyphosate over there, Roundup. And it makes a big difference.
Jessie Inchauspe – And the seed oils.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Yeah, and the seed oils.
Jessie Inchauspe – It’s just, yeah, it’s not the same world.
Dr. Steven Gundry – So that’s how you do it.
Jessie Inchauspe – And also lots of wine and lots of cigarettes. That’s how we do it.
Dr. Steven Gundry – I’m glad you brought that up. We won’t go there on today’s episode. But, yes, my wife is pretty fluent in French, so we spend a lot of time in France. And it’s fascinating, you literally, whether you want to or not, will spend two hours eating lunch. Seriously, and we do. And, you know, back in the good old days, I was the ugly American. Why aren’t they bringing me the check? You know, I want to go. My father used to embarrass us, “Bring us the check,” and, you know, they won’t. And we’ve learned that this is, you accept this culture.
Jessie Inchauspe – And in school, for example, you get a 90-minute lunch break as a kid.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Whoa.
Jessie Inchauspe – So you go to school at 8:30 until 12, and then you get an 1.5 break, and then you go back to school from 1:30 to 4:30. That’s just how it works. That’s the pace.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Are we overpacing ourselves in the United States? I mean, you live here as well.
Jessie Inchauspe – I think it’s difficult because there’s not such a deep food culture here. Therefore, it’s very easy to get brainwashed by marketing messages and the food landscape we live in. So with this work and with these hacks, I’m hoping to bring to light some of these very easy cultural and somewhat European habits and to explain the science behind them so that everybody can apply them.
Dr. Steven Gundry – All right, and you’ve put this into practice, it’s one thing to say, okay, here’s what you do. You did an experiment with 2,700 participants. Tell us about that.
Jessie Inchauspe – Well, all the hacks are based on clinical trials and studies that I haven’t run, right? I was just looking at all the research and synthesizing it into these tips. Before the second book, I thought, “Wouldn’t it be cool to run an experiment?” Now, for all the scientists listening, no control group, no placebo, no randomization, right? It’s just an experiment. But what I did is I recruited 2,700 people, and I got them to do the four-week method before the book came out actually. And I got feedback on all of the recipes, et cetera. So here are the results. So during these four weeks, they just did the savory breakfast, vinegar, veggie starter, and movement. And the rest of the time they did whatever they wanted. They ate, they drank whatever they wanted, right? After the four weeks, 90% of people were less hungry. 89% of people reduced their cravings. 77% of people had more energy. 58% were sleeping better. 58% said their mental health had improved. 46% said their skin improved. And 41% of people with diabetes improved their diabetes numbers just by adding these four hacks in, not changing anything else. So if that’s not encouraging, I don’t know what is.
Dr. Steven Gundry – Thanks for watching, but don’t go anywhere. The next episode of “The Dr. Gundry Podcast” is waiting for you now. So the more processed foods that you eat, it’s guaranteed to slow your metabolism, not the genes that your parents gave you.
