 savory breakfast vinegar veggie starter movement. And after four weeks of that you're already on a much better glucose situation. Jesse, it's great to have you in person here. Thanks for making the trip out to California. Thank you, Dr. G for having me. Nice to meet you. Congratulations on your success. That's fantastic. Thanks so much. Yeah, it's funny how blood sugar became a thing. Who would have 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. Yay. So you yourself have written these bestsellers. How in the world did you get interested in these topics? 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 going to stop. Basically my nervous system was completely shot. And I realized at that 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 it could help myself and how it 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 alert, genetics did not teach me much about what to do to improve my mental health. Right? But as I was there, I discovered the world of glucose. I had the opportunity to put on the 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. And 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. Wow. So once again, many innovators, it's usually a personal health issue that kind of started the process. Yeah, 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 might be facing a glucose problem. 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, etc. 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. Makes sense. 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, etc. 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 roller coaster, it's going to be really hard for you to feel well. 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 this switch. 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 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. 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. 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 three and a half hours just sitting at a table. It was a big talk show. And the woman next to me after two and a half 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. Yeah, that's absolutely right. So in your books are a lot about this as are mine. How do you overcome this problem? Yeah. How do you study your glucose levels? 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 want to go totally keto. That felt like something that wasn't going to 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 on 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 focused on the four most important ones. And as you use these, you're going to reduce the spikes in your body, the glucose spikes, retrain your mitochondria to go to burning fat for fuel. You're going to 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. 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. What is it? You basically all you eat is rice. Never heard of it? No, never. You just eat rice. All you eat is rice. Okay. And it dramatically makes you lose weight. No, nothing else. Just rice. Just basically rice. Wow. Yeah. I mean, you can have a few vegetables. The foundation is plain rice. Interesting. 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 it. 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. Well, if they, if they're switching from eating sugars to sucrose to just glucose, it's dramatically better for your health. Say that again. 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's 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, a fructose spike as well, which is way worse for your body than the glucose alone. 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. Fascinating. 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 happened to carry that mutation. And I have to keep reminding people that in the good old days, It was great. It was great. Yeah, absolutely. It was fabulous. And we only had fruit in a very short time period. You know what else was great in the good old days? The fact that eating something sweet released dopamine in the brain? That was great, right? Because it told you, oh, if it's sweet, eat as much as you can. 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. Yeah, absolutely. In fact, I was listening to a YouTube of Alessio Fazzano, who you might know is a leaky gut researcher at Harvard. He's a GI gastroenterologist. And he gives this lecture, and he says, when strawberries were only available two months out of the year. What a concept. 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. And he said, They're actually gross. They don't even taste that good. No, and they're just cold and watery. 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, it is really mysterious. 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 going to reduce your sugar intake, because glucose and fructose go hand in hand. It's really difficult to find fructose on its own. So if you're focusing on, I want to reduce my glucose spikes, as a result, you're also going to reduce sugar. For example, my first and most important hack I teach people is to have a savory breakfast instead of a sweet one. And that is removing the fructose from your first meal of the day, which is so helpful. All right, define a savory breakfast. So a savory breakfast is a breakfast built around protein. Okay, 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 nothing 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, etc. But most importantly, nothing sweet in the morning, except if you really want some, some whole fruit. But again, for taste, right? What you want to avoid is a breakfast that is pure starch and sugar. For example, oats with honey and a banana, right? Right. 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 jams, no cereal, no muesli, no granola, etc. No vegetables, no smoothies. But if you really want something sweet, a piece of whole fruit. 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? Really? Oh yeah. Because what a wonderful way 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. Oh, thank you for saying that. Yeah. So the oranges we find today, the bananas, the strawberries, they are 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 bred gray wolves into shiwahuas for fun, right? To create a breed that they enjoyed, they have bred fruits and vegetables to thousands of years of selective breeding. And so today, our bananas are the shiwahua equivalent to the ancestral gray wolf or 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 going to slow down the impact of that on your blood. Now, the problem arises when you denature that piece of fruit. Bingo. Right? You smooth it, you pulverize the fiber particles, you juice it, you remove the fiber entirely, you dry it to remove the water, etc., etc. 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 beetroot 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. 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 in they eat things whole. But you're right, our fruit, it doesn't even resemble anything. It's a human invention. It's a creation. And actually, oranges didn't even exist in Russia. They have been just made up. It's amazing. Yeah, I actually used to live in a community nearby here, Redlands, California, next to Loma Linda. And Redlands invented the naval orange. And that's literally, it was across. I thought they were invented in China oranges. Maybe a different group. Yeah, a different group. The naval orange are invented in Redlands, California. Fascinating. There you go. And you're right. It was an invention. It was hybridized for sugar content. Exactly. And now we have karakara oranges, which are just pure sugar. Yeah. And of course, we were designed to seek out sweet taste. I mean, what 60% of our taste buds are sweet receptors. And people often confuse, you know that feeling when you get, when you eat something sweet, 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 you're mitochondrial suffering within. 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. Now, let's talk about insulin resistance. Why is that kind of the one-two punch of this? Well, first of all, insulin tends to get a bad rep, but it's actually vital, right? People who 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 stir 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 2 diabetes 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 want to try to reverse insulin resistance. All right. So what are the hacks to do that? In my second book in the method here, I focus on four most important ones. So the first one is the 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? Well, I'm a big fan of vinegar and I love acetic acid. 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 pack of the meal by up to 30%. So week two of the method, I introduce vinegar into your days once a week, 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 going to 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 going to 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. You may not know this, but I'm actually the inventor of the fake Coke, where the YouTube phenomenon where you put some balsamic vinegar in San Pellegrino water. And I invented that in my first book. No way. That's amazing. 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. Exactly. Right? Exactly. 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. I love that study. It's very interesting. Yeah, it's really cool. And you know the walking after eating, yes, it's a cultural habit, but actually, look at the other hacks. They're also habits. For example, vinegar, it's in every single kitchen in the world. Yeah, exactly. It's around. We know that it's a health ingredient. Veggie starters, I mean, antipasti, crudité in France, in the Middle East, they are herbs by the bunch at the beginning of a meal. The salad with the vinaigrette, you know, to start a dinner is so common in Europe. This is not groundbreaking stuff. It's just showing scientifically why our habits are so good for our health. Yeah. In fact, fidgeting is really good for you. And fidgeters actually are in general much thinner than non-fidgeters. Really? 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. Yeah, the soleus muscle. Yeah, the soleus. And there is a really cool study. It's Andrew Huberman who started talking about this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so if you do these calf raises after a meal. Yeah, we're going to do calf raises the rest of the time. Ten minutes now, yeah. But yeah, so I mean, who would have guessed? But right, it's scientifically, this is a really useful muscle. Isn't that interesting? Yeah, it's like... It's the muscle we use when we're walking. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 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 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. Yeah, I'm just getting me on my glucose. And 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. 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? The same hack applies. Whatever time your break fast is, whether it's at 6am or 2pm, 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 going to 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're 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. I'm kind of chilling and I'm like, oh, I'm going to do that little hermetic stress on my body because it's going to 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? Well, for one thing, I advise all my female patients who are in the child-bearing years that this is probably a really dumb idea if particularly you want to get pregnant and we've seen that in my practice as well. On the other hand, I'm impressed with the data that came out of the NIH a few years ago. There were two competing studies of calorie restriction and resus monkeys out of the University of Wisconsin and the NIH. 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 control basis. And I think the reason these animals do well is because when your 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 a 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 it was about, 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. It mattered how time-restricted they were in terms of longevity. Interesting. Interesting. 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 than six meals a day, for example. But then how far do we apply this? Yeah, it's an interesting, ongoing experiment. Right, 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. Okay. One group had a 12-hour eating window where they breakfast at 8 o'clock in the morning, lunch at 1 o'clock, and had to finish dinner at 8 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 one dropped. The other group didn't. I spend my career getting people's insulin-like growth factor one 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. 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. I think the problem, again, with females is that, well, our energy sensor is mTOR. And you're 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 going to eat. Yeah. 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, right? Absolutely. I don't think we all have to go back to the Rubinesque figure. But the earth mother figure of ancient cultures is a very robust-looking female. And I think there was a reason for that. But the obsession with thinness in females, we've been blasted with messages. 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 going from thin to extra thin. It's just unnecessary. So what do you think about fake sugars? I mean, no calories. Yeah, no glucose spikes. Yeah. Listen, it's always, 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, quote unquote, worse sweeteners, I believe they're still going to 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 going to give me cancer. Therefore, I should drink Coke with real sugar. So I really want to help people avoid that change. We should not go from as, 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? Actually, yeah. I'm 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. So how does allulose work exactly? 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 it should be. 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. So I think it's actually a real observable phenomenon. I think David Promiter has called it nature's ozempic, which might be a little powerful. Does it act on GLP-1? It does act on GLP-1 because it actually stimulates bacteria to make GLP agonist. 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, unobsorbable by us, but feeding the gut bacteria. That group had no hunger. And the other group, for a few days at least, were really hungry. I like that because 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. The other way also happens. So if you give your bacteria way too much sugar or things that are going to create an overgrowth of the bad ones, you feel super hungry. So sometimes I'm going to a nice dinner or whatever, and I'm having a lot of cake in the evening, a lot of sugar, 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. 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. They're French paradox. Yeah. 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 they eating croissant 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. 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. You go get your vegetables every day. There 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. You go to the cheese monger. 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. 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. 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 concierre and said, 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, Miss, I could not do that. He said, because it would not be available. I said, well, yesterday, oh, Miss. He was apoplectic, but I could even ask for such a thing. You have to wait until 6 a.m. until the boulangerie opens. You can have yesterday's croissant. Hell, ooh, yeah. Yeah, everything is fresh. Exactly. And of course, we make this bread that will last for years because of the... And all of our bread is sourdough as well, by the way. Well, it's actually fermented. Yeah, actually fermented. Actually fermented. And we talked off-camera. You don't have much glyphosate over there. Roundup. And it makes a big difference. And the seed oils. Yeah, and the seed oils. Yeah, it's not the same world. So that's how you do it, man. And also, lots of wine and lots of cigarettes. That's how we do it. 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. And seriously. And we do. And back in the good old days, I was the ugly American. Why aren't they bringing me the check? I want to go. My father used to embarrass me. Bring us the check. And they won't. And we've learned that this is... You accept this culture. And in school, for example, you get a 90-minute lunch break as a kid. So you go to school at 8.30 until 12, and then you get an hour and a half break, and then you go back to school from 1.30 to 4.30. That's just how it works. That's the pace. Are we overpacing ourselves in the United States? I mean, you live here as well. 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. All right. And you put this into practice. It's one thing to say, okay, here's what you do. You did an experiment with 2700 participants. Tell us about that. 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. But for 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, it's just an experiment. But what I did is I recruited 2700 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.