The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: The Worst And Best Foods For Your Blood Sugar with Dr. Casey Means
Wed, 18 Dec 2024
What if you had a tool that helped you not only make better health decisions in the grocery store and restaurants but also gave you real-time feedback on how your body uniquely reacts to any kind of food? That is the beauty of wearable technology, and thanks to continuous glucose monitors this is something we’ll all be able to take advantage of in the near future. Levels is one company that’s been spearheading this field, providing an incredible amount of information on blood sugar responses and metabolic individuality. Today on “The Dr. Hyman Show,” I talk to Dr. Casey Means about what we can learn from the 51 million data points Levels has already gathered on blood glucose reactions, and so much more. View Show Notes From This Episode Get Free Weekly Health Tips from Dr. Hyman Sign Up for Dr. Hyman’s Weekly Longevity Journal This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health, Pendulum, Thrive Market, and Pique. Streamline your lab orders with Rupa Health. Access more than 3,500 specialty lab tests and register for a FREE live demo at RupaHealth.com. Pendulum is offering listeners 20% off their first membership order at pendulumlife.com/farmacy Discount applied at checkout. Head over to ThriveMarket.com/Hyman today to receive 30% off your first order and a free gift up to $60. Head over to PiqueLife.com/Hyman20 and get up to 20% off + a complimentary beaker and rechargeable frother.
Chapter 1: What are the worst foods for blood sugar?
And so you get to actually witness what your body does in response to a particular food or sugar. And you've got data from 50 million glucose readings, which is insane when you think about that amount of data that you're collecting and that people are using this technology. And we're learning so many things that are so surprising.
And I think we know, for example, that no two people respond the same to exactly the same food. For example, in Israel, they did a large study that looked at the microbiome, and they found that there were differences in people's blood sugar response depending on what bacteria were growing in their microbiome in their gut, which is like, what? That doesn't even make sense.
It depends on your genetics, depends on your overall metabolic health, it depends on so many different factors, your toxin load, all these modify your individual responses. When you've got these 50 million glucose readings from the Levels app, the continuous glucose monitor, what are the sort of surprising things that you found? These are sort of non-diabetics, right?
So it's not like you're a diabetic, although probably I bet you're picking up that. People like 90% of people with prediabetes have never been diagnosed. I bet you're picking up a lot of that. What are you learning? What are you seeing? What is surprising?
It has been so incredible to start to see some trends emerge from this huge, anonymized, aggregated data set, really the first of its kind in the world. Like you mentioned, we have 51 million glucose data points, and this is just amongst our closed beta program, 16,000 people who have gone through our closed beta program.
We have almost 200,000 people on our wait list, so you can imagine that 51 million is data points is going to get a lot larger when we start opening to more people. We have those 51 million glucose data points paired with 1.3 million food logs. We can start to see for the first time ever how specific foods across a population
are affecting, uh, glucose and, and creating this population data of a closed loop biofeedback. Um, you mentioned the individualized aspect of this. That is so true. And that paper that you referenced, um, personalized nutrition by prediction of glycemic responses that was done about five years ago in Israel showed how variable it is person to person.
Uh, we could both of course, eat the exact same cookie and you and I could have a very different glucose response based on several factors like our microbiome, our underlying insulin resistance, et cetera. That's a really important aspect is for the individual, what kind of data they can get to really truly personalize their own data based on glucose response because of course,
we talked about this a lot in our last episode a more stable glucose level with more gentle rolling hills after meals avoiding the huge spikes and valleys that we see after eating large amounts of carbohydrates and sugar that's what we want we want the gentle rolling hills the low glucose response so you can start to see that in yourself and shape your diet very quickly on the population level
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Chapter 2: How can we improve metabolic health?
I mean, Kellogg, who invented breakfast cereal as a breakfast food, which wasn't a thing, right? These are basically dessert for breakfast. It's 75% sugar and that is having a soda with breakfast. I think people need to get that cereal and starch for breakfast is a huge no-no. If you can do one thing to change your biology quickly, it's get rid of any starch or sugar for breakfast.
Yes. You said that it's like eating sugar for breakfast. I will up the ante here. It's much worse than eating dessert for breakfast. Peach pie has an average glucose spike of 46 milligrams per deciliter. Cinnamon toast crunch is 59. And they both have, of course, the refined seed oils and the flour. It's worse.
Give me the peach pie. I love peach pie. I know. Exactly.
Exactly. So you mentioned getting rid of the breakfast foods that have the refined starches. This has been one of the most fascinating things we've seen because all the common American breakfast foods are in the worst 100 foods that score. And these, just to run through them really quick, we're talking about this is in our worst 50 foods.
Egg McMuffin, bagel with cream cheese, French toast, Pop-Tarts, cereal, English muffin, blueberry scones, cinnamon roll, Cheerios, croissant, toast with jam. Those are all above a 40 milligram per deciliter spike. So that's a big spike.
Which is a lot.
It's a lot. If you look at then the best foods in our data set, like very little glucose spike, you also see a handful of breakfast foods. And so these are the ones we want to eat.
Like what?
We see frittata. We see avocado and egg, avocado and greens, chia pudding, Greek yogurt and berries. And we actually see this, a lot of people log this, I think because Kelly Levesque is sort of close in our network, but we get a lot of logs for the Fab Four smoothie, which is a smoothie that she has popularized, which is really balanced.
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