For most chronic conditions, from migraines to heart disease, the cause ends up being much more attributable to ‘lifestyle factors’ than to genetics. (Location 222)
(there is very unhealthy vegan food, and there is very unhealthy keto food). The ‘diets’ that work are the ones that flatten our glucose, fructose and insulin curves. When vegan and keto are done well, they both do this. (Location 343)
This is because fructose exists only hand in hand with glucose in foods and because insulin is released by our pancreas in response to glucose. (Location 355)
I’m a bit envious of the way plants do what they do. They don’t have to spend any time at the grocery store. They create their own food. In human terms, it would be like being able to inhale molecules from the air, sit in the sun and create a creamy lentil soup inside (Location 404)
They enlist tiny helpers called enzymes – teacher’s aides, if you will – that grab glucose molecules by the hand and attach them to each other: left hand with right hand, left hand with right hand, hundreds and thousands of times over. The result is a long chain of glucose, (Location 418)
Plants assemble glucose into long chains called starch in order to store it. (Location 423)
corn, wheat, barley, beans, peas, lentils, soybeans and chickpeas are all seeds, and all of them contain starch, too. (Location 425)
Most of plants’ fructose is used in this way, but some, with the help of another enzyme, links up, for a time, with glucose. The result is a molecule called sucrose. (Location 449)
For plants, sucrose is an ingenious temporary storage solution, but for us, it has a huge significance. We use it every day, under a different name: table sugar. (Location 451)
Starch, fibre, fructose and sucrose – the various forms glucose can take – exist thanks to photosynthesis. (Location 453)
Any food made from flour contains starch. Pie crust, cookies, pastries, pasta – all are composed of flour, so all are composed of starch. When we eat, we break starch down into glucose, using the same enzyme that plants use to do this task: alpha-amylase. (Location 474)
but what I want you to remember now is that although glucose is needed to fuel your body’s systems, fructose isn’t. We eat a lot of unnecessary fructose in our diet nowadays, because we eat a lot more sucrose (which, as a reminder, is half glucose, half fructose). (Location 487)
It doesn’t get turned back into glucose. This is why when we eat fibre, it remains fibre. It travels from our stomach to our small and large intestines. And this is a good thing. (Location 491)
Though it doesn’t turn back into glucose and therefore can’t provide energy to our cells, fibre is an essential part of our diet and plays a very important role in aiding digestion, maintaining healthy bowel movements, keeping our microbiome healthy and more. (Location 493)
In 1969, a cohort of scientists wrote a 20-page-long document titled ‘Tentative Rules for Carbohydrate Nomenclature, Part I, 1969’ and presented it to the scientific community. After that paper, it was accepted that the name for this family would be ‘carbohydrates’. Why carbohydrates? Because it refers to things that were made by joining carbon (carbo) and water (hydrate), which is what happens during photosynthesis. (Location 501)
Carbohydrates = Starch + Fibre + Sugars (glucose, fructose, and sucrose) (Location 505)
Nature intended us to consume glucose in a specific way: in plants. Wherever there was starch or sugar, there was fibre as well. This is important, because the fibre helped to slow our body’s absorption of glucose. (Location 537)
Fibre is often removed from processed foods so that they can be frozen, thawed and stored on shelves for years without losing their texture. (Location 548)
To quantify the concentration of glucose, we use millimoles per litre, also written mmol/L. Other (Location 611)
Until they do, remember that if the food you ate was sweet and it created a glucose spike, it also created an invisible fructose spike, and that’s what makes a sweet spike more harmful than a starchy spike. (Location 649)
Mitochondria feel the same way when we give them more glucose than they need. They can burn only as much glucose as the cell needs for energy, not more. When we spike, we deliver glucose to our cells too quickly. The speed – or velocity – at which it is delivered is the issue. Too much at once, and problems pile up. (Location 679)
Fructose molecules glycate things 10 times as fast as glucose, generating that much more damage. Again, this is another reason why spikes from sugary foods such as cookies (which contain fructose) make us age faster than do spikes from starchy foods such as pasta (which doesn’t). (Location 714)
Worldwide, three out of five people will die of an inflammation-based disease. The good news is, a diet that reduces glucose spikes decreases inflammation and along with it your risk of contracting any of these inflammation-based diseases. (Location 726)
Once insulin has stored all the glucose it can in our liver and muscles, any excess glucose is turned into fat and stored in our fat reserves. And that’s one of the ways we gain weight. (Location 752)
The fat our body creates from fructose has a few unfortunate destinies: (Location 755)
Finally, it enters the bloodstream and contributes to an increased risk of heart disease. (You may have heard of it as low-density lipoprotein (LDL) or ‘bad’ cholesterol.) (Location 757)
Excess glucose in our body and the spikes and dips it causes change us on a cellular level. Weight gain is just one of the symptoms we can see; there are many more. (Location 788)
The answer is not to try to eat less; it is to decrease our insulin levels by flattening our glucose curves (Location 815)
When we eat something that tastes sweet, we may think that we are helping our body get energised, but it’s just an impression caused by the dopamine rush in our brain that makes us feel high. (Location 838)
Unfortunately, sometimes this extra insulin can lead to insulin resistance, meaning our body no longer responds to insulin as well as it once did. Our insulin levels rise, but that doesn’t help stash excess glucose in the three ‘storage lockers’ any better, and our glucose levels rise, too. (Location 855)
This will influence not just how old you look externally but how old you are internally. The more often we spike, the faster we age. (Location 898)
We now know that it’s a specific type of cholesterol (LDL pattern B) as well as inflammation that drive heart disease. Scientists have found out why this is the case. And it’s linked to glucose, fructose and insulin. (Location 944)
This is a small, dense kind of cholesterol that creeps along the edges of the vessels, where it’s likely to get caught. (Location 949)
(LDL pattern A is large, buoyant and harmless – we get it from eating dietary fat.) (Location 950)
Triglycerides become LDL pattern B in our bodies. So by measuring triglycerides, we can gauge the amount of the problematic LDL pattern B in our system. (Location 960)
If you divide the level of triglycerides (in mg/dL) by HDL level (in mg/dL), you’ll get a ratio that is surprisingly accurate in predicting LDL size. If the result is smaller than 2, that’s ideal. If the result is above 2, it can be problematic. (Location 962)
So often, we focus on what and what not to eat. But what about how to eat? It turns out that how we eat our food has a powerful effect on our glucose curves. (Location 1047)
What is the right order? It’s fibre first, protein and fat second, starches and sugars last. (Location 1053)