Glucose Revolution – by Jessie Inchauspé

10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

While we all know that keeping balanced blood sugars is important for all us (be we diabetic, pre-diabetic, or not at all), it can be a mystifying topic!

Beyond a generic “sugar is bad”…

  • What does it all mean and how does it all work?
  • Should we go low-carb?
  • What’s the deal with fruit?
  • Carbs or protein for breakfast?
  • Is “quick energy” ever a good thing?
  • How do starches weigh in again?

It’s all so confusing!

Happily, Jessie Inchauspé has the incredible trifecta of qualifications to help us: she’s a biochemist, a keen cook, and a great educator. What we mean by this latter is:

Instead of dry textbook explanations, or “trust me” hand-waives, she explains biochemistry in a clear, simple, digestible (if you’ll pardon the pun) way with very helpful diagrams what things cause (or flatten) blood sugar spikes and how and why. If you read this book, you will understand, without guesswork or gaps, exactly what is happening on a physical level, and why and how her “10 hacks” work.

Her “10 hacks” are explained so thoroughly that each gets a chapter of its own, but we’ll not keep them a mystery from you meanwhile, they are:

  1. Eat foods in the right order
  2. Add a green starter to your meals
  3. Stop counting calories
  4. Flatten your breakfast curve
  5. Have any type of sugar you like—they’re all the same
  6. Pick dessert over a sweet snack
  7. Reach for the vinegar before you eat
  8. After you eat, move
  9. If you have to snack, go savoury
  10. Put some clothes on your carbs

She then finishes up with a collection of handy cheat-sheets and some of her own recipes.

Bottom line: this isn’t just a “how-to” book. It gives the how-to, yes, but it also gives such good explanations that you’ll never be confused again by what’s going on in your glucose-related health.

Get your copy of Jessie Inchauspé’s #1 international bestseller, “Glucose Revolution”, from Amazon today!

Don’t Forget…

Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!

Recommended

  • Immunity – by Dr. William Paul
  • How To Stay Alive (When You Really Don’t Want To)
    How to Stay Alive: Understanding Suicide Risk Factors and Finding Support. Learn how to talk about it, remove access to firearms, and build a strong social support network.

Learn to Age Gracefully

Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:

  • You May Have More Air Pollution In Your Home Than In The Street

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    Certainly, gas stoves and heaters can cause indoor air pollution, with carbon monoxide (CO) being the main risk. Even if you have a CO alarm, the level at which it will go off is usually the “this will kill you tonight if you don’t do something about it soon” level, rather than the “this will slowly kill your brain cells but you’ll keep functioning otherwise, until one day you don’t” levels of CO.

    Still, do by all means have a CO alarm if you have anything in your house that can release CO!

    See also: Association Between Carbon Monoxide Intoxication and Incidence of Ischemic Stroke: A Retrospective Nested Case-Control Study in South Korea

    Fun fact about those stoves:

    ❝Just 1 kilogram of cooking fuel emits 10 quadrillion particles smaller than 3 nanometers, which matches or exceeds what’s emitted from cars with internal combustion engines.

    At that rate, you might be inhaling 10-100 times more of these sub-3 nanometer particles from cooking on a gas stove indoors than you would from car exhaust while standing on a busy street.❞

    ~ Ka‌yla Alb‌ert

    But today, we’re not here about that

    Rather, we are looking at some more innocent-seeming things, such as scented cleaning products and air fresheners. Notably, the biggest problem is often not even the cleaning chemicals themselves. Of course: please don’t breathe bleach fumes, etc.

    But that’s an obvious risk, and today we’re about the less obvious risks.

    So… What is the less obvious risk here?

    It’s the fragrances. The terpenes used to hold them react with ozone in the air, to create new nanoparticles. And, just like the nanoparticles from the stove, these can reach very high concentrations indoors, and suffice it to say, if you can smell the fragrance then you have the pollutants inside you.

    You can read about how badly different products score, here:

    Rapid Nucleation and Growth of Indoor Atmospheric Nanocluster Aerosol during the Use of Scented Volatile Chemical Products in Residential Buildings ← you’ll need to scroll down to the table with different cleaning products and air fresheners

    Further, the seemingly-harmless scented candle is, as it turns out, quite a menace too:

    ❝Full-scale emission experiments were conducted in the Purdue zEDGE Test House using a variety of scented candles (n = 5) and wax warmers/melts (n = 14) under different outdoor air exchange rates (AERs). Terpene concentrations were measured in real-time using a proton transfer reaction time-of-flight mass spectrometer (PTR-TOF-MS). PTR-TOF-MS measurements revealed that scented candle and wax warmer/melt products emit a variety of monoterpenes (C10H16) and oxygen-containing monoterpenoids (C10H14O, C10H16O, C10H18O, C10H20O), with peak concentrations in the range of 10−1 to 102 ppb. Monoterpene EFs were much greater for scented wax warmers/melts (C10H16 EFs ∼ 102 mg per g wax consumed) compared to scented candles (C10H16 EFs ∼ 10−1 to 100 mg per g wax consumed). Significant emissions of reactive terpenes from both products, along with nitrogen oxides (NO, NO2) from candles, depleted indoor ozone (O3) concentrations. Terpene iFs were similar between the two products (iFs ∼ 103 ppm) and increased with decreasing outdoor AER. Terpene iFs during concentration decay periods were similar to, or greater than, iFs during active emission periods for outdoor AERs ≤ 3.0 h−1.

    Overall, scented wax warmers/melts were found to release greater quantities of monoterpenes compared to other fragranced consumer products used in the home, including botanical disinfectants, hair care products, air fresheners, and scented sprays.❞

    ~ Dr. Emily Reidy et al.

    Read in full: Rapid Nucleation and Growth of Indoor Atmospheric Nanocluster Aerosol during the Use of Scented Volatile Chemical Products in Residential Buildings

    Put in fewer words: scented candles are bad, and wax melts (the kind with no flame, that one might easily expect to thus produce fewer emissions) are at least as bad if not worse, and both are even worse than cleaning products.

    Some of the same research team conducted further studies, because of this this, finding:

    ❝We performed field measurements in a residential test house to investigate atmospheric nanoparticle formation from scented wax melt use. We employed a high-resolution particle size magnifier-scanning mobility particle sizer (PSMPS) and a proton transfer reaction time-of-flight mass spectrometer (PTR-TOF-MS) for real-time monitoring of indoor atmospheric nanoparticle size distributions and terpene mixing ratios, respectively.

    Our findings reveal that terpenes released from scented wax melts react with indoor atmospheric ozone (O3) to initiate new particle formation (NPF) events, resulting in significant indoor atmospheric nanoparticle concentrations (>106 cm–3) comparable to those emitted by combustion-based scented candles, gas stoves, diesel engines, and natural gas engines.

    We show that scented wax melt-initiated NPF events can result in significant respiratory exposures, with nanoparticle respiratory tract deposited dose rates similar to those determined for combustion-based sources.

    Our results challenge the perception of scented wax melts as a safer alternative to combustion-based aromatherapy

    ~ Dr. Satya Patra et al.

    Read in full: Flame-Free Candles Are Not Pollution-Free: Scented Wax Melts as a Significant Source of Atmospheric Nanoparticles

    In short: you might want to ditch the fragranced products!

    Want to do more?

    Give your household hair a makeover with this multi-vector approach to deal with different risks:

    What’s Lurking In Your Household Air?

    For that matter, the air is a very important factor for the health of your lungs (and thus, for the health of everything that’s fed oxygen by your lungs), and there are more things we can do in that regard as well:

    Seven Things To Do For Good Lung Health!

    Take care!

    Share This Post

  • Maximize Your Misery! (7 Great Methods)

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    Let’s imagine that instead of being healthily fulfilled in life, you wanted to spend your days as miserable as possible. What should you do?

    Here are a few pointers:

    Stay still

    Avoid physical activity and/or outdoor exposure, to avoid any mood-lifting neurochemicals. In fact, remain indoors as much as possible, preferably in the same room.

    If you want to absolutely maximize your misery, make your bedroom the sole space for all activities that it’s possible to do there.

    Disrupt your sleep

    Keep an irregular sleep schedule by varying your bedtime and wake-up times frequently. Sleep in as much as possible, and make up for it by staying up late to ensure ongoing exhaustion.

    Maximize screentime

    Use digital entertainment as much as possible to distract you from meaningful activities and rest—as a bonus, this will also help you to avoid self-reflection.

    Begin and end your day with a device in hand.

    Fuel negative emotions

    If you’re going to focus on something, focus on problems you cannot control, to stoke the fires of anger and angst.

    A good way of doing this is by staying informed about distressing events, while avoiding meaningful actions to address them. Contribute only in token gestures, and then lament the lack of change.

    Follow your impulses

    Act on short-term desires without considering long-term consequences, while avoiding behaviors that you know might improve your mood or wellbeing.

    Trust that doing the same things that have not previously resulted in happiness, will continue to reliably deliver unhappiness.

    Set goals to miss

    It’s important that your goals should be vague, and overly ambitious in their scope and/or deliverability. Ideally you should also disregard any preparatory work that a person would normally do before embarking on such a project.

    Bonus tip: you can further sabotage any chances of progress, by waiting for motivation to strike before you take any action.

    Pursue happiness

    Focus on chasing happiness itself, instead of improving your situation or skills. Treat happiness as an end goal, instead of a by-product of worthwhile activities.

    Want to learn more?

    If you’d like to know many more ways to be miserable, we featured these 7 from this book of 40, which we haven’t reviewed yet, but probably will one of these days:

    How to Be Miserable: 40 Strategies You Already Use – by Dr. Randy Paterson

    Alternatively…

    If for some strange reason you’d rather not do those things, you might consider a previous article of ours:

    How To Get Your Brain On A More Positive Track (Without Toxic Positivity)

    Enjoy!

    Share This Post

  • The Brain As A Work-In-Progress

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    And The Brain Goes Marching On!

    In Tuesday’s newsletter, we asked you “when does the human brain stop developing?” and got the above-depicted, below-described, set of responses:

    • About 64% of people said “Never”
    • About 16% of people said “25 years”
    • About 9% of people said “65 years”
    • About 5% of people said “13 years”
    • About 3% of people said “18 years”
    • About 3% of people said “45 years”

    Some thoughts, before we get into the science:

    An alternative wording for the original question was “when does the human brain finish developing”; the meaning is the same but the feeling is slightly different:

    • “When does the human brain stop developing?” focuses attention on the idea of cessation, and will skew responses to later ages
    • When does the human brain finish developing?” focuses on attention on a kind of “is it done yet?” and will skew responses to earlier ages

    Ultimately, since we had to chose one word or another, we picked the shortest one, but it would have been interesting if we could have done an A/B test, and asked half one way, and half the other way!

    Why we picked those ages

    We picked those ages as poll options for reasons people might be drawn to them:

    • 13 years: in English-speaking cultures, an important milestone of entering adolescence (note that the concept of a “teenager” is not precisely universal as most languages do not have “-teen” numbers in the same way; the concept of “adolescent” may thus be tied to other milestones)
    • 18 years: age of legal majority in N. America and many other places
    • 25 years: age popularly believed to be when the brain is finished developing, due to a study that we’ll talk about shortly (we guess that’s why there’s a spike in our results for this, too!)
    • 45 years: age where many midlife hormonal changes occur, and many professionals are considered to have peaked in competence and start looking towards retirement
    • 65 years: age considered “senior” in much of N. America and many other places, as well as the cut-off and/or starting point for a lot of medical research

    Notice, therefore, how a lot of things are coming from places they really shouldn’t. For example, because there are many studies saying “n% of people over 65 get Alzheimer’s” or “n% of people over 65 get age-related cognitive decline”, etc, 65 becomes the age where we start expecting this—because of an arbitrary human choice of where to draw the cut-off for the study enrollment!

    Similarly, we may look at common ages of legal majority, or retirement pensions, and assume “well it must be for a good reason”, and dear reader, those reasons are more often economically motivated than they are biologically reasoned.

    So, what does the science say?

    Our brains are never finished developing: True or False?

    True! If we define “finished developing” as “we cease doing neurogenesis and neuroplasticity is no longer in effect”.

    Glossary:

    • Neurogenesis: the process of creating new brain cells
    • Neuroplasticity: the process of the brain adapting to changes by essentially rebuilding itself to suit our perceived current needs

    We say “perceived” because sometimes neuroplasticity can do very unhelpful things to us (e.g: psychological trauma, or even just bad habits), but on a biological level, it is always doing its best to serve our overall success as an organism.

    For a long time it was thought that we don’t do neurogenesis at all as adults, but this was found to be untrue:

    How To Grow New Brain Cells (At Any Age)

    Summary of conclusions of the above: we’re all growing new brain cells at every age, even if we be in our 80s and with Alzheimer’s disease, but there are things we can do to enhance our neurogenic potential along the way.

    Neuroplasticity will always be somewhat enhanced by neurogenesis (after all, new neurons get given jobs to do), and we reviewed a great book about the marvels of neuroplasticity including in older age:

    The Brain’s Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity – by Dr. Norman Doidge

    Our brains are still developing up to the age of 25: True or False?

    True! And then it keeps on developing after that, too. Now this is abundantly obvious considering what we just talked about, but see what a difference the phrasing makes? Now it makes it sound like it stops at 25, which this statement doesn’t claim at all—it only speaks for the time up to that age.

    A lot of the popular press about “the brain isn’t fully mature until the age of 25” stems from a 2006 study that found:

    ❝For instance, frontal gray matter volume peaks at about age 11.0 years in girls and 12.1 years in boys, whereas temporal gray matter volume peaks at about age at 16.7 years in girls and 16.2 years in boys. The dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex, important for controlling impulses, is among the latest brain regions to mature without reaching adult dimensions until the early 20s.❞

    ~ Dr. Jay Giedd

    Source: Structural Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Adolescent Brain

    There are several things to note here:

    • The above statement is talking about the physical size of the brain growing
    • Nowhere does he say “and stops developing at 25”

    However… The study only looked at brains up to the age of 25. After that, they stopped looking, because the study was about “the adolescent brain” so there has to be a cut-off somewhere, and that was the cut-off they chose.

    This is the equivalent of saying “it didn’t stop raining until four o’clock” when the reality is that four o’clock is simply when you gave up on checking.

    The study didn’t misrepresent this, by the way, but the popular press did!

    Another 2012 study looked at various metrics of brain development, and found:

    • Synapse overproduction into the teens
    • Cortex pruning into the late 20s
    • Prefrontal pruning into middle age at least (they stopped looking)
    • Myelination beyond middle age (they stopped looking)

    Source: Experience and the developing prefrontal cortexcheck out figure 1, and make sure you’re looking at the human data not the rat data

    So how’s the most recent research looking?

    Here’s a 2022 study that looked at 123,984 brain scans spanning the age range from mid-gestation to 100 postnatal years, and as you can see from its own figure 1… Most (if not all) brain-things keep growing for life, even though most slow down at some point, they don’t stop:

    Brain charts for the human lifespancheck out figure 1; don’t get too excited about the ventricular volume column as that is basically “brain that isn’t being a brain”. Do get excited about the rest, though!

    Want to know how not to get caught out by science being misrepresented by the popular press? Check out:

    How Science News Outlets Can Lie To You (Yes, Even If They Cite Studies!)

    Take care!

    Share This Post

Related Posts

  • Immunity – by Dr. William Paul
  • How To Recover Quickly From A Stomach Bug

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    How To Recover Quickly From A Stomach Bug

    Is it norovirus, or did you just eat something questionable? We’re not doctors, let alone your doctors, and certainly will not try to diagnose from afar. And as ever, if unsure and/or symptoms don’t go away or do get worse, seek professional medical advice.

    That out of the way, we can give some very good general-purpose tips for this one…

    Help your immune system to help you

    So far as you can, you want a happy healthy immune system. For the most part, we’d recommend the following things:

    Beyond Supplements: The Real Immune-Boosters!

    …but you probably don’t want to be exercising with a stomach bug, so perhaps sit that one out. Exercise is the preventative; what you need right now is rest.

    Hydrate—but watch out

    Hydration is critical for recovery especially if you have diarrhea, but drinking too much water too quickly will just make things worse. Great options for getting good hydration more slowly are:

    • Peppermint tea
      • (peppermint also has digestion-settling properties)
    • Ginger tea
    • Broths
      • These will also help replenish your sodium and other nutrients, gently. Chicken soup for your stomach, and all that. A great plant-based option is sweetcorn soup.
      • By broths, we mean clear(ish) water-based soups. This is definitely not the time for creamier soups.

    ❝Milk and dairy products should be avoided for 24 to 48 hours as they can make diarrhea worse.

    Initial dietary choices when refeeding should begin with soups and broth.❞

    Source: American College of Gastroenterology

    Other things to avoid

    Caffeine stimulates the digestion in a way that can make things worse.

    Fat is more difficult to digest, and should also be avoided until feeling better.

    To medicate or not to medicate?

    Loperamide (also known by the brand name Imodium) is generally safe when used as directed.

    Click here to see its uses, dosage, side effects, and contraindications

    Antibiotics may be necessary for certain microbial infections, but should not be anyone’s first-choice treatment unless advised otherwise by your doctor/pharmacist.

    Note that if your stomach bug is not something that requires antibiotics, then taking antibiotics can actually make it worse as the antibiotics wipe out your gut bacteria that were busy helping fight whatever’s going wrong in there:

    A gentler helper

    If you want to give your “good bacteria” a hand while giving pathogens a harder time of it, then a much safer home remedy is a little (seriously, do not over do it; we are talking 1–2 tablespoons, or around 20ml) apple cider vinegar, taken diluted in a glass of water.

    ❝Several studies indicate apple cider vinegar (ACV)’s usefulness in lowering postprandial glycemic response, specifically by slowing of gastric motility❞

    (Slowing gastric motility is usually exactly what you want in the case of a stomach bug, and apple cider vinegar)

    Source: Effectiveness of Nutritional Ingredients on Upper Gastrointestinal Conditions and Symptoms: A Narrative Review

    See also:

    Take care!

    Don’t Forget…

    Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!

    Learn to Age Gracefully

    Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:

  • Breathe; Don’t Vent (At Least In The Moment)

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    Zen And The Art Of Breaking Things

    We’ve talked before about identifying emotions and the importance of being able to express them:

    Answering The Most Difficult Question: How Are You?

    However, there can be a difference between “expressing how we feel” and “being possessed by how we feel and bulldozing everything in our path”

    …which is, of course, primarily a problem in the case of anger—and by extension, emotions that are often contemporaneous with anger, such as jealousy, shame, fear, etc.

    How much feeling is too much?

    While this is in large part a subjective matter, clinically speaking the key question is generally: is it adversely affecting daily life to the point of being a problem?

    For example, if you have to spend half an hour every day actively managing a certain emotion, that’s probably indicative of something unusual, but “unusual” is not inherently bad. If you’re managing it safely and in a way that doesn’t negatively affect the rest of your life, then that is generally considered fine, unless you feel otherwise about it.

    A good example of this is complicated grief and/or prolonged grief.

    But what about when it comes to anger? How much is ok?

    When it comes to those around you, any amount of anger can seem like too much. Anger often makes us short-tempered even with people who are not the object of our anger, and it rarely brings out the best in us.

    We can express our feelings in non-aggressive ways, for example:

    When You “Can’t Complain”

    and

    Seriously Useful Communication Skills!

    Sometimes, there’s another way though…

    Breathe; don’t vent

    That’s a great headline, but we can’t take the credit for it, because it came from:

    Breathe, don’t vent: turning down the heat is key to managing anger

    …in which it was found that, by all available metrics, the popular wisdom of “getting it off your chest” doesn’t necessarily stand up to scrutiny, at least in the short term:

    ❝The work was inspired in part by the rising popularity of rage rooms that promote smashing things (such as glass, plates and electronics) to work through angry feelings.

    I wanted to debunk the whole theory of expressing anger as a way of coping with it,” she said. “We wanted to show that reducing arousal, and actually the physiological aspect of it, is really important.❞

    ~ Dr. Brad Bushman

    And indeed, he and his team did find that various arousal-increasing activities (such as hitting a punchbag, breaking things, doing vigorous exercise) did not help as much as arousal-decreasing activities, such as mindfulness-based relaxation techniques.

    If you’d like to read the full paper, then so would we, but we couldn’t get full access to this one yet. However, the abstract includes representative statistics, so that’s worth a once-over:

    A meta-analytic review of anger management activities that increase or decrease arousal: What fuels or douses rage?

    Caveat!

    Did you notice the small gap between their results and their conclusion?

    In a lab or similar short-term observational setting, their recommendation is clearly correct.

    However, if the source of your anger is something chronic and persistent, it could well be that calming down without addressing the actual cause is just “kicking the can down the road”, and will still have to actually be dealt with eventually.

    So, while “here be science”, it’s not a mandate for necessarily suffering in silence. It’s more about being mindful about how we go about tackling our anger.

    As for a primer on mindfulness, feel free to check out:

    No-Frills, Evidence-Based Mindfulness

    Take care!

    Don’t Forget…

    Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!

    Learn to Age Gracefully

    Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:

  • Easily Digestible Vegetarian Protein Sources

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!

    Have a question or a request? You can always hit “reply” to any of our emails, or use the feedback widget at the bottom!

    In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!

    As ever: if the question/request can be answered briefly, we’ll do it here in our Q&A Thursday edition. If not, we’ll make a main feature of it shortly afterwards!

    So, no question/request too big or small

    ❝What could be easily digestible plant sources of protein for a vegetarian. My son is a gym holic and always looking for ways to get his protein from lentils other than eggs. He says to reach his protein requirement for the day, the amount of lentils he has to eat is sometimes heavy on the gut. Would really appreciate if you throw some light on this ❞

    Unless one has IBS or similar (or is otherwise unaccustomed to consuming healthy amounts of fiber), lentils shouldn’t be at all problematic for the digestion.

    However, the digestive process can still be eased by (speaking specifically for lentils here) blending them (in the water they were cooked in). This thick tasty liquid can then be used as the base of a soup, for example.

    Soy is an excellent source of complete protein too. Your son probably knows this because it’s in a lot of body-building supplements as soy protein isolate, but can also be enjoyed as textured soy protein (as in many plant-based meats), or even just soy beans (edamame). Tofu (also made from soy) is very versatile, and again can be blended to form the basis of a creamy sauce.

    Mycoproteins (as found in “Quorn” brand products and other meat substitutes) also perform comparably to meat from animals:

    Meatless Muscle Growth: Building Muscle Size and Strength on a Mycoprotein-Rich Vegan Diet

    See also, for interest:

    Vegan and Omnivorous High Protein Diets Support Comparable Daily Myofibrillar Protein Synthesis Rates and Skeletal Muscle Hypertrophy in Young Adults

    Don’t Forget…

    Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!

    Learn to Age Gracefully

    Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails: