Why Your Daily Commute Spikes Blood Sugar | Mindfulness & Nutrition

[00:00:00] 90% of the US Alloy population have some degree of metabolic dysfunction. Learn to live with these crashes, but there's another way of living. Everyone has a very different reaction to different foods. Writhing increases my blood sugar without food. The body is expecting to move and do activity, and therefore the blood sugar goes up. It isn't all just about food. Every spike triggers some kind of stress response in the body. Sometimes we can just feel stressed, and we don't really understand why. Worth checking out at least once in your life to see what's what.

[00:00:30] Harry, welcome my friend. I am recording from a different room today because, to be honest, I've been up there for two recordings already for different shows, and it's like a little sweat box in this heat. And I can't tolerate it anymore. So I've come downstairs into my downstairs office where I've got a little bit more light. I've got air conditioning in here if I need it. I've turned it off for the recording. Yeah, I hope you don't mind. I'm in a different space today, but I'm a little bit dark as well as you are. I am also in a new room because although it's the same room, I literally had it painted today.

[00:00:58] So I've got a new color, my stiff key blue farrow and ball knockoff color match, which I think I'm liking it. It feels more like an office and less like a utility room because it is technically a utility room. But it looks good with the wooden desk, which isn't going to stay anyway long term. But I've only been in here for about 10 minutes. So this is hot off the press and it feels good.

[00:01:22] And I've got the breeze. I've got the trees I'm looking at. So I'm in a very different set up to you, but all very good. So, yeah, I'm looking forward to our chat because I want to talk about an experiment I've been running for the last 10, 12, well, probably 12 days along with my mom. We were going to talk about this last episode, weren't we? But when you were only a few days in and we got sidetracked, as we often do. So you should have a little bit more data to report on this time, I presume.

[00:01:47] Yeah. I mean, so for the listeners that don't know what we're talking about, I recently bought a couple of CGM. So CGM stands for continuous glucose monitor. It's a little device that if you're watching us, you could probably see on the back of my arm a little white device that you use an applicator to press onto your skin and it stays there for around 14 days.

[00:02:11] It effectively puts a tiny little bit of a metal thing underneath your skin. So it doesn't really pierce you all the way through. You don't really feel it when it goes in. I did it for myself and for my mom. You barely feel it. It's like a little tiny scratch, if that. And it links up via Bluetooth, which obviously I'm not super a fan of having Bluetooth connected, but for two weeks it's okay. And you get an app and it will show you your blood glucose in effectively real time.

[00:02:37] Even if you're not with your phone, it'll store it on the device. Then next time you sync up with your phone, it'll maintain it. And yeah, I think it's really interesting to talk about blood glucose because my mom is pre-diabetic. So I was trying to look at really for me showing her in real time what certain things were doing, like when she has problem where she eats. So then she is hungry again. I'm like, well, that's because you're eating the wrong foods, right?

[00:03:03] So she'll have corn flakes for breakfast and then be hungry later and have Philadelphia on toast and then still be wanting to eat more. And I'm trying to show her just how much that affects her blood glucose and explain to her as well why that's an issue and why that's important and what insulin does and all of that. So yeah, I thought it'd be interesting to talk about blood glucose, why it's a thing, what is it? I was monitoring myself about a year ago, Tim Speck. You get them with his kits that he sends out.

[00:03:32] I can't remember what it's called, the brand is now. It's interesting. I found it interesting because I was obviously going all my, quite heavily into my training at the time. I've got a, actually it's not my desk here. I've got a glucose monitor and I've got a few little monitors. I try different things. I haven't used it for a little while, but I think also for our listeners being the mindful past, like it's not just a diabetes story. We look at glucose monitoring. It's a mindfulness story, right? It's you know that every spike that you have or every crash that you have has an impact on your cortisol, has an impact on your adrenaline, our stress levels.

[00:04:01] I think it's not just the energy. I know you mentioned that with your mom and the cravings. It's also like learning how to notice what food makes you feel better or makes you feel good. What gives you more bodily awareness? Because it's not just about nutritionism. It links to stress. It links to cortisol. Well, actually, I think that's a good point. Let me dial it back a bit to like that listener who has got absolutely no idea what we're talking about. Right. And so the body, when it eats food, uses that food for a number of things.

[00:04:29] One is fuel, but actually also creating new cells in the body and actually becomes your body. This is something I didn't really recognize until maybe 10 years ago that our cells are obviously continually destroying and being rebuilt, but they're being rebuilt the foods. The food that you're eating is literally the building blocks for your new body. So if you eat stuff laden with chemicals and plastics, your body's being built up with that.

[00:04:51] But we also use it for fuel. And so that fuel is in various forms, but one form is going to be glucose, like blood sugar or a sugar that is used. And so we need that, right, because that's going to fuel us. And actually, a few things that are quite interesting. So you have a range that you might be between. And the idea is that your wave or your peaks and troughs are quite smooth as opposed to jagged and high.

[00:05:17] You want them reasonably steady. And actually, I remember I was talking to someone the other day about our cycle rides and how I often, even back then, because I remember reading, I can't remember if it was a book. I think the runner was Steve, someone or other, but he ran across America and he was doing it basically fueled by fat. Now, traditionally when with marathons and things like that, it's always this carb loading, eat pasta and the microphone and all that.

[00:05:43] I've not been of that school of thought for about 15 years. I'm much more of the school of thought of fuel with fat. And so when we used to do our cycle trips, I used to focus on that to try and keep a sustained energy. I remember, I think it was like Mu is a classic example, who was basically carbon up and down, up and down, where he was having those gels, which give you that super spike. And then that crash and the crash. Yeah.

[00:06:07] I only ever did like carbohydrate as a spike. If we were going up a hill, we knew we had a 10 minute hill or 20 minute hill. And then I would do something there because it would get the fuel into the blood and into the cells much quicker, but it wouldn't be, I wouldn't have as much of a crash because I already had a sustained level of fat deposits. Yeah. I mean, it is what we'll end up going off on a, as we often do off piste a little bit. I think when people go on marathons, they hit the wall in inverted commas.

[00:06:34] I've hit the wall. That's usually or often when your body starts utilizing fat for energy instead of the easily accessible carbohydrates, when we run out of our carbohydrate stores, the easily accessible energy. And we're not that efficient at burning fat for fuel. Unless you train it. Unless you train it, but most people use it for stone. But even if you do train it, there's still more calorific. So it's still harder, but it's, yeah, you can train for it. I think the point is, I mean, carb loading, there's a lot in it. I've obviously done a lot of endurance based events.

[00:07:00] If you carb load correctly, it's really good to fuel the muscles and fill the muscles. I think you can obviously do it on fats, but it's just worth understanding. It's not a straight swap. As you said, you have to train these things. Your body is not doors fat first as it is, and will burn off the easily accessible energy and the glucose first. One of the things interesting on the glucose monitoring stuff is your friend that you met, I think it was Chastity, that was in Angan Chastity you met. You got the picture. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:07:26] So in his book and on his podcast, he talks about how 90% of the US adult population have some degree of metabolic dysfunction. Yeah. And abnormality in how they process food and energy. And I think when you look at things like this glucose monitoring, make the invisible visible, right? You see inside your body, you start to see these waves that you talk about, and you just start to get the grips with whether some of the foods you're eating are helping you in the way that we think that they are and whether they are causing those crashes. Sometimes we might blame it on something else, or we may not always understand it.

[00:07:56] We learn to live with these crashes, but there's another way of living. It's like always living tired and suddenly a good night of sleep. You know, oh my God, why didn't I sleep earlier? You know, I could feel like this every day. We don't always know. We've got to make the visible visible. I think that's where this morning swing could be quite interesting. When we talk about, and I think going back to what you said maybe five, 10 minutes ago about having that mindful approach and noticing things. What I found interesting about this is that I'm very mindful about how things interact with my body.

[00:08:23] For example, I've said many times, I think on this podcast before that I try not to have sugar after four, five o'clock because I know it's going to affect my sleep. But there are some weird things that have happened with this reading that I think it's worth just sharing. Yeah, I definitely want to get into it. I think it's just key to let our listeners know it's not just about food eating habits. This is holistic. It links to well-being and everything else. Yeah, this is what I will get to because just rewinding a little bit. So let's say you have a band, a number, I think it's like 3.8 to 7.8 where you want your

[00:08:52] blood sugar to remain for most people. This particular app will measure what they call lingo points. So I'm using one no affiliation with something called lingo. I think the NHS version is Libra, which they give out to. That's the one I use, the Libra one. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So it's the same brand. It's by a company called ABBA. But anyway, they give you certain lingo points. So if it spikes and you've eaten, then you get the point. But if it spikes and then you move, it doesn't count towards your total for the day or whatever.

[00:09:22] But you want to be between this kind of upper and lower limit effectively without going too high or too fast on it and on that. And what happens and I'm going to explain, I know you already know Nick, but I've explained to listeners because I was trying to explain to my mum why this is an issue because she would see, for example, her blood sugar would go up when she had cornflakes and it would go past her threshold. And then it would come down a little bit later. But she was like, so what's the big deal? It's going up, it comes back down and anything like that. And so I've tried to create a little bit of a metaphor and analogy because I like that.

[00:09:51] So the way I'm going to describe it to listeners is imagine you've got a factory full of workers. And their job is simply to put these boxes into lockers, right? You've got lockers all around the room. Their job is simply put boxes into lockers. And in our analogy, the workers are insulin, okay? And the boxes are sugar and the lockers are cells. So effectively, insulin's job is to put the sugar, the fuel into the cells.

[00:10:20] And so if you give it a lot of sugar, you need a lot of insulin, a lot of workers to then put that into the lockers in the right time. Now, when you're living your normal life and you put a lot of sugar in, you might not notice it so much because what will happen is your factory workers, they see all the work coming in and they want to tease you. So they work really hard and they get it all into the lockers, no problem, but they're kind of exhausted afterwards. They'll give you a bit of a rest.

[00:10:44] And then the next day or the next hour, you give them loads more boxes to put into the lockers and they kind of do that again and again. And over time, either the factory workers get tired and less efficient or they just go on strike and they say, look, you know, working conditions are not right. And what we really want to do is, yes, give them those boxes, but give them those boxes in a more measured way so they can put them into the lockers. You don't need as much staff and all of that.

[00:11:10] And what happens for a lot of people who get insulin resistance or diabetes is their workers are just basically either going on strike or giving up. And so we want to make sure that even though you might not notice anything because your workers are working OK at the moment, but they're working to extremes and you don't want them to do that, really. So that's the main thing. And so now the thing is that you and I can eat the same food.

[00:11:34] So I did this with my mom and we had some ice cream late last Monday night when we were at some theatre event. She only had maybe three spoonfuls and I had the entire rest of the tub. We both spiked, but hers spiked much higher and lasted a lot longer than mine did because her workers were more knackered than mine through more years of abuse, really. So it's quite interesting that different same foods, different people obviously will affect you.

[00:12:03] But a couple of big realizations I had. One, driving. I don't know if you noticed this at all when you had yours, but driving increases my blood sugar without food. Well, driving for me, as you know, not the best case point for this because I, as you know, I have a central reservation full of pick a mix and I cannot drive and not eat at the same time. When I'm driving, I am constantly gorging on pick a mix, which is sugar crush spike.

[00:12:30] And it's habit more than anything else I look for. It makes the, I don't enjoy driving as you know, it makes it more tolerable and I look forward to it. So I'm probably always driving on a sugar spike. Okay. You have a sweet tooth of driving. I'm a bad example for that. Yeah. My mind spikes without anything though. My mind spikes without anything. And I didn't understand that at the beginning. Now I think I understand why, even though I wasn't stressed, it was a nice day or whatever. I don't feel stressed in the car. Yeah.

[00:12:54] I think inherently driving is a stressful activity, even if you don't feel stressed, because what your body is doing is it's going into hyper-focus to like see to danger, be observant. And very much like when you're going on a hunt or very much like when you're being attacked by a lion or tiger. And therefore you enter a form of fight or flight, even if you don't realize it. And the body is expecting to move and do activity. And therefore the blood sugar goes up. And that's why my blood sugar I think rises when I drive.

[00:13:24] And more importantly, one of the things I think I'm going to start doing going forward, I went for food at a friend's place the other day and it was reasonably healthy. I was kind of testing the data, but I did have rice. It was darling rice and then some avocado, which is fat. And it did go up. But interestingly enough, I had to go and do some errands after that. And I was in the car for about an hour and a half. And because I didn't have time to move the body, it just stayed up for three hours, whereas normally it would have gone down again.

[00:13:52] So one of the things I think I'm going to do going forward is if I ever stop at a service station and eat, which I sometimes do, especially when I do the Brighton London run, is just walk around the car park for five, ten minutes before going into the car. I did the two in Brookway, but I remember there being like a two hour march. We start coming down. We stay hiking for over two hours. That's overstressing. I don't know if that's still the case, not what you're doing. I do remember though, he has a, I mean, you follow his app. I'm on his call now. You'll know. He's got an app for me that people were doing. It was a big craze for a while. Yeah.

[00:14:22] What's his? Zoe. And I was part of the Zoe. You could sign up for the extra study piece. I was in the Zoe study. I remember in there, he used to get the updates and I remember he, I mean, you'll know this already. So it could be that your mum has always been eating that wrong differently. And that's why it's heightened. Yours come down. But also you learn that everyone has a very different reaction to different foods. So we're not all the same. So you could have that same experiment with completely different foods. And actually yours goes up and hers comes down because it's very personalized, very individual. And that's where these things be really useful.

[00:14:49] So you can kind of discover whether it is, you know, what foods are really keeping you heightened or which are coming down smoother. And you won't really know that without personal testing either with feel maybe. But I know Tim Spector was talking about his breakfast. So he used to think he was eating really healthy every morning. He had like low fat milk, yogurt, muesli, those kinds of foods. And he discovered they were the things actually draining his energy, right? So he ended up swapping over to bananas. Think it was apples or whatever it was, but he changed his diet.

[00:15:18] And arguably he would argue from what people would perceive to be healthy to healthy. But they had dramatically different impacts on his body. Now you and I might challenge whether the first are of muesli milk and whatever is healthy in the first place. But he was able to experiment to change those spikes. But for somebody else, it may have a completely different impact. So I think it's interesting to know how those foods do impact you differently. Well, I mean, I think also what's good about it, and I was trying to tell my mum is that this two week period that it lasts for is a perfect time to try lots of things.

[00:15:47] So this is my excuse for why I went out earlier. And I went out around three o'clock and went and got this chocolate ice cream, homemade ice cream that they do, like a vegan chocolate ice cream from a place called Morocco's near me. I had that because I was like, OK, I'm going to have that in isolation and see. And then actually about 10 minutes later, 15 minutes later, I went to this health food shop and bought this chocolate bar that I sometimes on occasion buy maybe once every few months. But it's a big amount.

[00:16:14] And I am shocked that my blood sugar has not risen because I've had around 60. Well, the chocolate bar alone was probably 60 grams of sugar. Bear in mind your daily limit should be 22. So I've had 60 plus the ice cream. God knows how much. However, I decided to go for a walk. And actually, I want to come on to strategies in a minute about limiting blood sugar. I decided to go for a walk only 10 minutes, 15 minutes.

[00:16:43] I'm still waiting for the blood sugar to go up. It's been flat the whole time. So it might go up when we're all cool now because I'm not moving my body so much. But the sheer fact of moving and not like intense movement because intense movement will activate it and make it go higher. But just a walk has kept that blood sugar, even though I've had copious amounts of sugar at bay, which is phenomenal. I think you know this is stuff. I think. Maybe they don't know. Maybe sometimes you assume they know things. Now, let's assume our listener doesn't know anything.

[00:17:12] So it's like fruit juice. Right. And you'll know this. I did this from my nutrition courses and you'll know this already. We have fruit juice in the morning. And fruit juice is one of the things will absolutely 9 out of 10 really spike your blood sugar. Right. Because it's full of foot toes and it might be full of six oranges. It's very different drinking that very quickly and getting a downy and eating six oranges. When you take out all the fibrous of the orange, which are actually there to help slow down the sugar release, it spikes. And you can argue, I'm eating the same foods. You are.

[00:17:42] But it's the fiber you're removing from the food juice that actually helps slow your blood sugar. So a lot of things, sometimes I think we do things, we think we're doing healthy things. And actually we're sometimes sort of, we're not almost. It's like, no, fruit juice is better than Coke or whatever, you know, but it's understanding what's behind it. If you remove all the fibrous material that slows it down, it's, you know. And that's like your walk after meals. That's going to, it's going to soften the glucose response, right? It's like a mind poor reset.

[00:18:09] Well, firstly, the fruit juice, the issue with that is we watched movies and on movies they have someone say, I've made you a healthy breakfast and I have the fruit juice and all this, that. Even I was seeing an advert today for, I think it was a former football, women's football person sponsored by Colgate to advertise Colgate. They're brushing their tooth, not with an electric toothbrush, but with a normal toothbrush. But they're brushing it in the way that my dentist says never has a brush yet.

[00:18:36] So, you know, and many watch movie, they're kind of like rubbing their, rubbing it vigorously against their teeth. And my dentist said, when you're not going to electric toothbrush, you should just be like scooping with the other brush. You shouldn't be like ever doing that. I saw a stand that comedians said never ever buy the toothpaste, but the dentist recommend. Like we're keeping them in business, right? If you see what I said, 95% of dentists agree. That's the one you want to be bought. Well, yeah, I mean.

[00:19:04] When it comes to toothpaste, actually, I don't know, maybe it's a different conversation, but I've started the last maybe four years buying instead of, I mean, I hadn't bought toothpaste with fluoride in for many years, but instead of fluoride, there's a compound, which actually your teeth are made of called hydroxyapatite. And so we want to look for toothpaste with hydroxyapatite, it's called, and that will actually remineralize your tooth supposedly. So that's a separate conversation.

[00:19:28] But some of the other interesting things I found with the monitor, and I understand that a lot of people listening, they may not do well with monitoring anyway. But like we've said before, right, Peter Drucker says, no, you can't manage with their measure. So I think it's useful for people to do once a year or something like that. But if you're a bit kind of OCD with it, then maybe stay away from it. What I've enjoyed from doing this is that it gives me an excuse to do certain things.

[00:19:54] So I was working last week or week four, and there was nothing really I could eat. So I went to the co-op and I decided to buy a croissant that did a massive spike, as you'd expect. And then some of these like Walker's crisps, like copper dom flavor kind of crisps, massive spike with that. I wasn't too bothered because I knew that I was going to be on my feet all afternoon in front of students. But that was interesting. Like I said, the driving was interesting.

[00:20:18] Another time at a school, I had just jacket potato, no butter, no nothing on it, except for I had some, I guess, boiled carrots and broccoli. A huge spike, huge spike. So that's quite interesting. But interestingly, some of the chocolates that I tend to eat regularly, like I had an on-bar chocolate on Saturday really late, maybe eight o'clock, whereas I was staying up for the football. And so I was quite happy with the sugar rush, but it didn't spike. I was going to say that's the other hidden one is like cider, lager, wine, the sugars in those.

[00:20:47] I think the thing, the recommendation I would take away, I'll give an example of one of these I discovered. Has it changed? Actually, two things have changed eating habits a little bit. The first is I never, the food juice one had an impact on me. I didn't learn that through the glucose ones, I learned that through my nutrition studies, but I just stopped drinking it. You know, I'll have it now and again if I'm at a hotel breakfast, but otherwise I don't buy it for the house. It's never in the house. So that's made a shift. And if I do, I make my own one, my own juices, I'll do it with like ginger and other bits. But I'm still, I try not to strip all the good stuff out and try and keep the fiber in. So that's something.

[00:21:16] The one thing I do remember, this is when I was doing my Ironman training. So I'd have been on the bike doing three, four hour sessions before work. So I'd be getting out on the bike half a day, five o'clock, half a day, doing a three hour session. And you need to fuel well. And I used to fuel always with toast because it's standard thing. You wake up and make coffee and you make toast, caffeine, whatever. And I was doing a question. I moved over to porridge and oats. Now, arguably both are carbs, which aren't great, you know, but they're slow release carbs, probably more on the oats than they are on the white bread, maybe.

[00:21:45] But I knew I was going to, it didn't bother me because I knew I was going to be on the bike for three hours. Kind of feel, you get into the mode, you can eat whatever you want to a certain degree. You're not going to store it. It's going to be burnt off. But my spike was way higher with the white bread toast than it was with the blackjacks. Now, some of these weren't just, I'm not just talking about porridge. I was making porridge, I was making flapjacks and making things like that. But it never really got over the danger spike for me with oats, even if I was like dousing them in honey flapjacks and stuff. I never went over the line, but it was sustainable for ages. So now when I do my long races, that's the kind of food I take with me.

[00:22:15] Because I know it won't take me so far that I'll crash, but it'll keep me sustained for ages. Whereas white bread would take me straight over and it would instantly come straight back down. I mean, it's basically like injecting sugar into your system before I'm trying to tell mom, I'm trying to move her away from like the pasta. So we had, I made a carbonara the other day, but it's a vegan carbonara. So I make the sauce using cashew nuts and coconut milk. And then we had, I think instead of bacon, some tofu, have some mushrooms, whatever.

[00:22:44] But importantly there, the pasta was lentil pasta, but lentil is the entire ingredient. So there's not nothing else other than lentil. That kept things reasonably flat. Yesterday I tested, I make a stir fry quite often and I tend to have rice noodles, which I know the rice noodles is going to spike it. It went up quite a lot yesterday, but then I was thinking I did have effectively three people's portions in one go. So I'm debating that.

[00:23:10] I think I need to massively have my spikes always later in the day as well, because at the beginning of the day, I tend to have the smoothie and the juice and I have a vegetable juice. So it's not very, and that doesn't spike me that the smoothie and the juices, they'd spike me, but all my sugar spikes are towards the end of the day. However, I'm trying to move my mum away from basically we're trying to do some simple swap outs.

[00:23:33] So instead of, you know, the toast, she wants toast, but I'm going to try and experiment her with maybe rye bread or sourdough bread, even my. The lentil one's interesting. I have to find it. So I did one of my nutritional courses was our natural health nutrition. We're going back decades. I've got the notes all in my files upstairs, but I do remember it's all I've mentioned on the show before. It's always stuck with me. There was, you could revert, which is the diabetes you can reverse? One of them is type two.

[00:23:59] Well, I mean, type two, there's a show called simply raw that I recommend people watch where supposedly someone reversed their type one, but that's some. So I think maybe we'll start to, but the study that I read was only came to mind because they were talking about blood sugar, which was very closely. Glucose monitoring is obviously very closely linked to those that are on diabetes and we want to try and prevent diabetes, which can be more preventable if we're not always spiking our body all the time. I mean, the sugars and making myself work harder with the analogy or metaphor used earlier. But I do remember reading a study in there, which I had to write a paper on it.

[00:24:27] I had to find it because this was about 10 years ago around diets full of a bean based diet. So I conclude lentils, pulses, anything that kind of creates life in grain or pulse or bean form was able to completely reverse people that were suffering with type two diabetes. I thought it was interesting because you mentioned the lentils thing. I was trying to find, I was just put on GPT now so I can find the study because we're going back a long time ago, but I've definitely got it in my notes. And I remember saying it to you, I've got my father-in-law's diabetes and my type two and my brother-in-law's type one.

[00:24:56] And just saying, look, if it helps, you might just want to have more, you know, those little decisions you make. We're not sure what to have for dinner and you're at a buffet, take the beans, not the pasta, you know, just simple choices. Yeah, that's the thing I'm trying to, so I've created some visual charts for my mom to put on the fridge of certain swap outs. Now they're not necessarily perfect swap outs, but for example, it might say from white rice to whole grain rice. Now, whole grain rice has got issues in other ways.

[00:25:24] And some people will say actually white rice is better than brown rice, but let's think about it from a, for purely one aspect, one dimensional blood sugar. I haven't, we haven't tested it yet, but I imagine it should be better. Then instead of that entirely, maybe we're choosing buckwheat or maybe we're choosing quinoa. And so, you know, quinoa is basically a, I think it's a complete protein. So that should a satisfy a protein need, but also it's quite light. So you can get quite full.

[00:25:53] You don't feel too bloated from it or tired. So that might be a nice swap out instead of pasta, moving to lentil pasta, a few things like that. I've created some swap outs for instead of its normal bread, either the rye bread, the sourdough bread or something else. Gluten free bread, interesting is, is obviously fully massively processed. I've been experimenting with the gluten free bread that I normally have. And I haven't noticed.

[00:26:20] So the other day I had it with an entire tub of hummus though, like 200 grams, entire tub of Sainsbury's hummus. No spike whatsoever. Then the day after I had four slices of pita bread, but I had a full egg omelet with peppers, spinach, onion, no spike whatsoever. Stayed full for eight hours, like totally fine. So it's really interesting. Have you heard of the Gluten? She's done a book. It's in our fine issue.

[00:26:47] Well, yes, I bought the book, but my mum insisted I returned it. I bought the recipe book rather than the Revolution book. I think it's the recipe one we've got. But she insisted she wasn't me. I actually bought it. And the next day I was at my friend's house and her mum, who's got one of these devices as well, she actually had it on her coffee table. But yeah, my mum insisted that she wasn't going to look at it. And so I returned it, but she has got this Channel 4 show, which I do recommend people watch because it's going to explain things in quite simple terms called East Smart. You can watch it on Channel 4 player.

[00:27:17] And it's a two part one, making an hour each episode. She takes people through a bit of a journey and she's got some very simple swap outs. I've heard her on the Gallery of a CEO, I think many years ago and a few other podcasts. But one of them is the order in which you eat your food. And this is what I like is that it's not changing the kind of food you're eating. Eat what you're normally going to eat.

[00:27:38] But make sure you do effectively the fiber slash vegetables first, then the proteins, then the fats or protein fats, let's say probably much less. But carbohydrates last. That will do a massive amount of your blood sugar as well. She says, rack in your carbohydrates in vegetables, like creating a blanket, which is again what I've been saying to people for a long time in my pan low 80 20 is that make most of your.

[00:28:07] Your visual plate, that fibrous vegetable site. You say thing. If you eat the fiber and fiber and protein first means you're fuller quicker. So if you are going to leave anything on the plate, you're leaving the carbohydrate. So actually, one of the things I've been using the last year, which I was kind of against for a long time, I've found them quite useful when I'm in a pinch. And I'm sure you would have heard of them as well. Those shul drinks. Yeah.

[00:28:32] I'm not really a biggest fan of that necessarily, but they sometimes have vending machines at airports and other places. And I find them quite useful in a pinch. I had one of those the other day to test the numbers. And I always feel reasonably full on it, but in a weird kind of full way because it's like protein full. I found my looking, I said about a decade ago, apparently it was from a study and it says, GBT says, I think you're remembering a 2012 randomized trial with 121. It's a relatively small study with type two diabetes.

[00:29:01] It could well be this. They can't find anything else. I'm guessing this is the study that I looked at. I said about a decade ago, 14 years ago, while again, but it says participants were encouraged to eat at least one cup of beans, chickpeas or lentils daily as part of a low glycemic index diet. After three months, the HbA1c fell by 0.5 percentage points compared with 0.3 on a high wheat fiber diet, which was being recommended at the time. Blood pressure also improved.

[00:29:27] The difference attributable to the bean based diets was approximately 0.2 percentage points compared with the control diet that was being recommended at the time. So I thought it was good that was, you know, it showed improvements in fasting glucose from regular genes. What they said at the end is obviously type two diabetes can achieve remission. It's usually associated with not just beans, it's associated with an overall dietary and lifestyle program, which is fair enough. What it does say though, just to give our listeners something to think about, especially if you've just been diagnosed or you're worried about type two diabetes.

[00:29:54] A sensible approach would be to replace some refined carbohydrates or processed meat with half to a cup of beans, chickpeas or lentils most days. And that's a quick, pretty easy swap out. You're talking about swapping things over. It does say increase gradually to avoid bloating, but even if you're getting full, you know, you're going to eat less. Beans still do contain carbohydrates, so portions and total calorie intake do matter. But even so, I'm pretty sure that must've been the study because I can't find anything else. I mean, yeah, with things like beans, lentils, except it is dependent on the thing you're having.

[00:30:22] And also it depends on, you know, how you prepare them, whether you use things like pressure cookers, soak them, all these sorts of things to get rid of, I guess. I just remember my courses with the two biggest bits of advice, once I've shared many times in this course, which is trying to have five different colors on the plate, because each color represents a different nutritional value. Yeah. Variety is the spice of life, as they say. So I think actually, you know, for people with type two diabetes, one of the things actually, I don't know if you know this or not, but that got me into talking about health and wellbeing.

[00:30:52] So when I started 15 years ago, 15 years ago, I guess I went on, I talk about it in super vitality, but I went on a personal development course. I went to this course all about law of attraction, but on the last day he was talking about health and brought all these people on. But some of the things that I learned through that journey, it wasn't just on that course, it was through interacting with lots of people, was that we'd effectively been lied to about certain diseases, longevity, aging, and so on.

[00:31:22] One of which was about heart disease, right? That you've got heart disease, you can't reverse it. That's not true. But also type two diabetes, right? Up until probably 15 years ago, I thought type two diabetes was, you know, you're kind of done with that. But it is reversible. I don't know if I like the word remission, but I guess it means, okay, you're in remission, but if you do the things that got you in there in the first place, you've got to go back to it. But effectively, you're curing it. You're not diabetic because it's a measure of blood sugar.

[00:31:50] But there is a good documentary I do recommend people watch if they are interested. It's years old, maybe 15 years old, called Simply Raw. And in that documentary, they took only six people. I think maybe four had type two and two had type one. Type one diabetes is generally the one you're born with. The reasons are a little bit unclear as to how you get it. It might be to do with the mother and whatever else. But anyway, they took them on a raw, I think it was raw food diet. It must have been, hence the title, Simply Raw.

[00:32:19] But those with type two diabetes, I think fully reversed it. But there was one guy who I think he believed he had type two, but then it turned out he had type one and reversed it. So don't quote me on that. But the other guy who had type one diabetes who cheated during that 30-day experiment. I remember he took over to Tijuana to go and drink. So 15% cheated. Yes, but he still cheated on his study, right? Because he was not doing the thing he should be doing. He kind of went and had alcohol.

[00:32:49] He still went from like 25 units of insulin a day down to five or something like that. So yeah. So the point is there's usually a way around that. So I think if you are someone that, I think even if you're not someone that is suffering with prediabetes or diabetes, understanding the blood sugar thing is really interesting. And also what you can do. So for example, like I said before, I've had this massive amount of sugar, but going for a 15-minute walk after you eat dampens the effect.

[00:33:17] Or even if you can't go for a walk, I was saying this to my mom, when you're sitting watching TV, just do heel raises, activate your calf muscles, clench your hands together. Anything that effectively mimics the body into this idea that it's got to use muscles will dampen the blood sugar response. So that's one thing. The other thing I'm going to test, and I've bought some today. I don't know if you do it yet. I used to have it every morning. Is apple cider vinegar. I used to have a pint of water. Yeah, yeah.

[00:33:44] So I've got a bit lazy recently, but religiously, every morning I would have a pint of water, which was full of apple cider vinegar, electrolytes, creatine, collagen. Yeah. And then I have my B6, B12, sort of CG1 kind of, or AG1 that's called kind of mix. I whack it all into one and then take it all down. I know you're not supposed to layer everything in one go, but it was like a morning thing of like super water. And I don't drink water, as you know. So it was like a way of getting everything in. Yeah. Take it early. It didn't taste very good, I'll be honest. I know there's lots of big benefits. So I was kind of like, yeah, we'll get a go. Yeah.

[00:34:14] I think I'm going to just talk to my mouth. It was really good today. I know that my dad, when he was diagnosed with diabetes, the other thing actually is worth mentioning to people listening, especially if someone who's on statins, which I know a lot of people might be listening, is statins. And I tell this to my dad, he only developed diabetes after going on statins. And I looked into it and statins do increase the risk of diabetes. So that is, and also now that's probably why my mom, she's on statins and is now pre-diabetic. But so if you're on statins, which again is another discussion. Yeah, I agree.

[00:34:43] Whether there's any real valuing that certain people. I mean, actually I was talking to my friend the other day who lives in America, the one that I tried to connect you with. He stopped taking it. He's a doctor, but he stopped taking statins. But I was saying to him, look, you are actually the one user case where statins do seem to be beneficial because statins really, the data only shows that they are really beneficial for you if you've already had a heart attack, not in, if you've not had a heart attack.

[00:35:11] So he's already had a heart attack before, I think once or twice. And so I'm like, you probably should be on statins. And it's like, you wouldn't normally hear me like do that or say that, but you probably should be on statins. But anyway, statins make you more likely to be diabetic, I guess is the thing. So I think apple cider vinegar is something to test to see with the same food, does it dampen things? The other thing that the glucose goddess says, so some of the techniques she says is, yes, you have your fiber and, you know,

[00:35:41] plants first, then your proteins, then your fats, then your carbohydrates. Walk 15 minutes afterwards, or even just before you do those things, drinking your apple cider vinegar, I think either side of the meal, but definitely 30 minutes before. But they're basic things, which everyone could do, I think. And they all make a big difference. Well, it sounds marginal gains, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, the apple cider vinegar, I think, had relatively limited evidence, but I did it anyway. I don't know if a huge amount of evidence supports it, but sometimes it's like all these changes.

[00:36:10] It's a bit like you can see the evidence in the device. Well, I think that's why all these devices are good. They're good for curiosity. They're good for seeing what you can't see. Yeah. Have the same meal two days in a row, once with apple cider vinegar, once without, and see what happens. I think also, like it's, and we say this all the time, whatever your food beliefs are, whether you're vegetarian, vegan, or you eat everything, it's a bit like you can make smarter choices. So you talked about carbohydrates going from lentils. There's still carbohydrates in beans and lentils, but there's also loads of other minerals,

[00:36:39] nutrients and proteins and things within those other foods. So sometimes it's not about trying to avoid, I don't personally agree with trying to avoid entire carbs, fats, proteins. You shouldn't eliminate, they're all important for the body, but you can make sensible choices. If you want to have fruit juice, you know, try and eat an orange instead of extracting all the goodness out of it and drinking the juice straight out of water and eat an orange. There's just little things you can switch around that just improve things. And as you say, if you get a GCN monitor, you can monitor how it actually impacts the body. And the other thing is, it's important to remember,

[00:37:09] is what is it you're doing 90% of the time? Now, orange juice, I didn't know that we ever really bought it since childhood because I think- Remember Sunny Delight? Oh my God, that was like shit. We didn't necessarily agree with it. Pure sugar. I don't know that stuff. Oh no, we would never. My parents, interestingly enough, the only thing I can remember in our pantry or freezer or anywhere that was quote unquote processed, and it's only marginal process, would be things like, we're trying to break anyway, baked beans, that'd be something in a can,

[00:37:39] and then fish fingers. That's the only two things I can think of that we ever had. We would never, ever allow, what are they called? Are they called, like Ribena, Cordials, all those things? My bean baked beans is pretty acceptable. My parents never allowed those in us. I don't think I've ever had them. I would, I still make, I have my baked beans. Yeah, yeah, no, I'm not saying it's not. Well, I'm just saying that I remember there being very limited, like, items in packets and whatnot. And we ate really, really well, because obviously my dad loves cooking.

[00:38:08] It was his kind of happy place, but he wasn't always like that. When he moved to the UK at 18, he ate, I think, to six months straight at this cafe in Kings Cross Station. He'd showed me where it was once, and he just ate fry-ups, the classic English fry-up, and got really dodgy and ill, and the doctor was like, do you know that? He was on a paleo diet. That's what it was, paleo. It wasn't really paleo, because paleolithic people did not have fry-ups. I'm giving him some bandwidth. He's not here to defend himself.

[00:38:38] What was good is that his sister, like, basically got him cooking in a kind of stealth way by asking him to do certain things when she went out and about. So he learned to cook, and it was his happy place, and he used to cook maybe 85% of our meals, and then the other 50% except my gran would cook. Yeah, I remember your dad being a great cook. He cooked some good things for me in the back of the day. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I think, I mean, cooking is a skill, like, that is just so important, that he's lost. I don't know that even in schools, they do my home economics.

[00:39:08] My niece is learning stuff about food at the moment, but it's so important to understand. Even little things like, I think we've talked about on the show before, like when you look at a packet, that the ingredients in order is how much is in there, but how they disguise sugar. And I talk about this in Super Vitality. I think I give maybe 50 different names for sugar, and you'll often see six of those in that, whereas if they just said sugar, it would be number one on the list, but now it's number two, number six, number five, number whatever. Yeah,

[00:39:36] it's like all the 0% fat yogurts and things you can buy, right? And it's just... Well, yeah, if you take out the fat, then you add in something else, right, as a percentage, which is generally sugar. Which then gets converted into fat in the body once it's stored. So it's like a... Yes, if you can't use the glucose and the carbohydrates, it gets stored in the liver as well, and that's ripped up. And there's usually way more of it than the fat. You're often much better going for the full fat version. Yeah. But I guess the point I was going to say with the orange juice was that occasionally I will have orange juice,

[00:40:06] even the other day, I think, not the other day, but maybe about a month ago, I had a can of Coke, whatever it might be, which I probably have maybe three or four a year. I'm not doing it with guilt. And we talk about this all the time on the show about like doing things with awareness. And so I think you really have to understand what kind of person you are. I'm someone that will track things and I'm into that app every day, adding my things, but I'm not obsessive to the point of neurotic about it

[00:40:33] or saying that I can't do a certain thing because of blah, blah, blah. So I think you really need to understand the kind of person you are before you venture into this world, because it could be a really bad thing as well for you. I think though this constant monitoring and checking is just, you know, okay, maybe you do this for two weeks and you need to try something else. It's having awareness all year round of trying to maximize and optimize what we eat and what we consume. I think a lot, most people go through life without even questioning it or just eat what they've always eaten.

[00:41:03] They buy what they've always bought. They don't really check. They don't even notice that actually the companies that the baked beans now will be different to the baked beans 10 years ago in the way they're produced. There'll be the cost savings somewhere. And it's, it just gives us an opportunity to have awareness. Like there's, I get frustrated sometimes when I watch some of these documentaries and they'll make a statement like, I don't know, and you can challenge me here, you know, vegans have way less heart diseases or whatever it is. That may be true, but also they're already 99% more aware of what they're eating than the rest of the population that are just eat everything.

[00:41:31] Because you already have made a choice to be more food conscious, more food aware on what you're putting in your body. Same with if you're anything, if I'm an athlete, I'm more consciously aware of what I'm fueling my body with than someone who's a non-athlete. So I think it's just a good thing. Like having this monitoring that you're doing is making you test, it's feeding your curiosity for what is good and what isn't good. It's making you test what works in the body and hopefully you'll end up healthier and have more awareness and more knowledge at the end of it, right? I think it is making me think a little bit more

[00:42:01] about something. I'm very surprised, I'm still very surprised the amount of sugar I've had today and it not have the effect I thought it was. Now it still has effect on my sleep because I know that my deep sleep tends to be a lot less when I have sugar later on in the day. So there are other, so just because one thing is not that bad, it doesn't mean that it's not going to affect me elsewhere. But I think having the awareness is I think super, super important to me as an individual. It doesn't mean that I'm always going to then follow the best course of action.

[00:42:30] But I think what's interesting is that I, like I said before, if I stop at a service station and have food now, I think I'm more likely to decide, let me just go for a five minute walk around the car park before I get into the car for the next two hours. The other thing that I would try to experiment with coming down from London the other day, and I don't think I did it enough, was breathe. No, actually, this is what I was doing. I wasn't breathing. Obviously, I was breathing, but in order to reduce

[00:43:00] my stress in the car, I was humming a lot. A radius nerve. Listeners may or may not know that humming, yeah, vagus nerves, stimulate your vagus nerves when you hum, but also when you sing or sometimes, because if you're on the motorway, no one can hear you effectively scream, so I would just be doing things like, like that, right? And I think, like, look at the graph, it's lower and flatter than it was in a shorter drive. So I think knowing that when I'm in my car by myself,

[00:43:29] I'm more likely to do things like humming, screaming, singing. And actually, there's something else in that. You're probably more likely just to laugh at yourself as well. Doing that, I mean, I laugh when you make laughs, and suddenly we laugh at ourselves, and laughter's a great, great thing for bringing down constantly. Actually, no, the other thing I did in the car, I recently discovered, I knew it was in there all the time, but I just applied it, was the cruise control feature. So I set it at, say, 70 miles an hour, and it automatically brakes if there's a car in front of you. So it's very lazy driving,

[00:43:59] but what it did allow me to do is it freed up both my legs to then do calf races and things like that in the car. So I was doing that whilst driving. So I think it was... Only you, Harry. Only you. Yeah, only me, only me. But I like to do these little quirky things. So I think that's really interesting, and even today, I did like 20 push-ups and 20 squats just against the wall for the push-ups after I had the ice cream and the chocolate, which may also have contributed to it

[00:44:27] not being as spiky. So I think little things like that, I think I'm going to be a bit more, mindful of going forwards and trying to do that. Yeah, I would say to listeners who are curious, it's worth knowing maybe once a year, I'm looking forward... Makes the invisible visible. That's the thing. Yeah, and I'm looking forward to when, personally, when they can add some sort of CGM reader into wearable technology that's not invasive. And even better, if you're someone who will get a little bit stressed

[00:44:57] by looking at things all the time, like we said, not monitor all the time, but what I'd say, once the device can actually call out to you and say, hey, you know, you haven't looked at your blood sugar for a few days, but I've noticed that when you do this, it's rising, what's going on? I think that would be more useful than constantly looking at it. As reminding people, this isn't all just about food. Every spike triggers some kind of stress response in the body, right? Yes, an exercise will spike it, but that's a good thing because you need the glucose to fuel it, but stress, such as driving

[00:45:27] or whatever, will also spike it because it leaves you playing into a fight. Sometimes we can just feel stressed and we don't really understand why and sometimes you realize you've been to McDonald's three hours before, you've eaten something and you're just feeling a bit low and a bit, you know, maybe there's nothing's actually happened bar what you've eaten, literally. So anyway, interesting, I would say, worth checking out at least once in your life to see what's what if you're not so inclined. See GMO this week, there you go. Yeah, I can see myself doing it like once or twice a year actually, I'm more than conscious. Well,

[00:45:56] that's to share your final results when you finish your full assessment. I'm sure there'll be some more to share next week. Yeah, we'll see. Well, I'm trying buckwheat noodles to dinner tonight instead of rice noodles, see if that makes a difference. 11.9, good stuff. All right, buddy, good to see you as always. Sorry for the slightly darker space for those watching on YouTube, but yeah, I'll be back from the usual room next time. I've had to avoid the swipe box. That's all right. Good stuff. All right, all good, my friend, all good. Have a good evening and hope our listeners have enjoyed it and remember to like, share, subscribe, share this out

[00:46:25] with anyone you can think of who's maybe thinking about their blood sugar, diabetes, prediabetes, all that. And search through the back episodes. We've done a few on nutrition now. We've done things about sleep and, you know, collect them all together if you're interested in the subject. We've covered quite a lot of ground over the episodes we've done since we started the show, so have a look at the back episodes and share those as well. Good stuff. All right, Harry, I'll let you go, my friend. Good to see you. Take care. Bye-bye.