 Standard American meals rich in processed junk and meat and dairy lead to exaggerated spikes in sugar and fat in the blood. This generates free radicals and the oxidative stress triggers a biochemical cascade throughout our circulation, damaging proteins in our body, inducing inflammation, crippling our artery function, thickening our blood and causing a fight-or-flight nerve response. This all happens within just 1, 2, 3, 4 hours after eating a meal. Worried about inflammation within your body? Well one lousy breakfast could double your C-reactive protein levels before it's even a lunch time. Repeat that three times a day and you could set yourself up for heart disease. So you may not even be aware how bad off you are because your doctor is measuring your blood sugar and fat levels in a fasting state, typically drawing your blood before you've eaten. But what happens after a meal may be a stronger predictor of heart attacks and strokes, which makes sense since this is where most of us live our lives in a fed state. And not just in diabetics. If you follow non-diabetic women with heart disease, but normal fasting blood sugar, how high their blood sugar spikes after chugging some sugar water appears to determine how fast their arteries continue to clog up. Perhaps because the higher the blood sugar spike, the more free radicals are produced. So what are some dietary strategies to improve the situation? Thankfully improvements in diet exert profound and immediate favorable changes. What kind of improvements? Specifically, a diet high in antioxidant anti-inflammatory whole plant foods, minimally processed high fiber plant-based foods such as vegetables and fruits, whole grains, beans, and nuts will markedly blunt the after meal increases in sugar, fat, and inflammation. What if you really wanted to eat some Wonder Bread, though? In less than an hour you'd get a big spike in blood sugar, but if you smeared it with almond butter, what would happen? Adding about a third of a cup of almonds to the same amount of Wonder Bread significantly blunts the blood sugar spike. But wait, wouldn't any low carb food help? I mean, why add almond butter when you can make a bologna sandwich? Well first of all, plant-based foods have the antioxidants to wipe out any excess free radicals. So not only can nuts blunt blood sugar spikes, but oxidative damage as well. And blunt insulin spikes, too. Adding nuts to a meal not only calms blood sugar levels, but also calms insulin levels. And now you're thinking, well, duh, less sugar means less insulin, but that's not what happens with low carb animal foods. If you add some chicken to white rice, steamed skinless chicken breast, you get a greater insulin spike than just the white rice alone. So adding the low carb plant food made things better, but adding the low carb animal food made things worse. Same thing with adding chicken breast to mashed potatoes, a higher insulin spike with the added animal protein. Same thing with animal fat, add some butter to a meal and get a dramatically higher insulin spike to some sugar. If you add butter and cheese to white bread, white potatoes, white spaghetti, or white rice, you can sometimes even double the insulin. Whereas if you add a half a avocado to a meal, instead of worsening the insulin response improves, as it does with the main whole plant food source of fat, nuts. What if instead of nut butter on your wonder bread, you used an all-fruit strawberry jam? We'll find out next.