In this week’s Fitness Edda episode, Coach Erik talks about blood sugar. Is it bad if it spikes? Do we need to worry about it? Coach Erik covers the order of eating method, insulin, blood glucose, the glycemic index, and how to spot charlatans on the internet. The transcript is below. Enjoy!

Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
01:28 Ordered Eating
04:56 All About Insulin
09:54 Blood Glucose
14:42 Glycemic Index
16:26 Spotting Charlatans

Transcript:

What’s going on, everybody? Coach Erik Castiglione here, owner and head coach of Viking Athletics here in West Hartford, Connecticut. We’re back with another installment of the Fitness Edda. Again, the goal of this web series is to cover popular topics in the health, fitness, wellness, and nutrition realm. There’s a lot of misinformation out there, and unfortunately, a lot of it is based on truth and fact. So, our goal is to shed some light on what’s true, what’s not, how to contextualize it in such a way that it’s applicable to your life.

So today, we’re talking blood sugar. It’s popular once again. We’re going to go over an approach to eating called ordered eating. It’s been popularized by a fitness influencer. We’re going to talk about that approach and what’s actually happening. We’re going to talk about insulin. Very difficult to cover blood sugar without covering insulin. We’re going to talk about blood sugar, blood glucose, we’re going to cover the glycemic index, and then I’m going to give you a pretty close to foolproof method in how you can spot people that are full of crap and just trying to sell you some stuff – spotting charlatans. So, we’ll end with that. But mostly I want to keep this positive and upbeat.

Ordered Eating

So ordered eating. What is it? I was first introduced to this nomenclature by my stepsister, who was actually following this. And it is a method of eating promoted by a fitness influencer. And the idea is you eat your protein first, then you eat your vegetables, and then eat any starchy carbs after that. If you’re setting up your plate in such a way, which is actually one of the strategies we use in our nutrition coaching practice, we call it the perfect plate. Half your plate should be filled with veggies, a quarter of the plate should be filled with a protein source, and a quarter of the plate should be filled with a starchy carb. And that’s a pretty good nutritional foundation for a meal.

So, if you set your plate up like that, and then approach your eating in this order, you’re going to be better off for it. I agree with that. It is not a bad approach to eating. According to this influencer, the reason to do that is that it stops your blood glucose from spiking if you eat following this order. The problem is it doesn’t really matter how much your blood glucose spikes, and that’s why we’re going to cover that as a topic in this episode.

What matters is how quickly it falls. If you are a healthy individual, it does not matter how high your blood glucose spikes. If you’re diabetic, all bets are off, and we’ll get into a little bit of that. But what actually happens and why we’re a big proponent of this approach for ordered eating is protein and fat, which you typically get from a source of meat, are both macronutrients that lead to satiety. They fill you up.

Vegetables contain a lot of fiber. Not a whole lot of calories based on the volume, so they’re nutrient dense, but they’re not calorically dense. They too will fill you up. So, if I’m eating these foods first during a meal, there is a better chance that I’m going to feel full. I have my starchy carbs at the end, and now I don’t feel like I need to eat something sweet. I am sated. I am full. I’ve gotten all the nutrients that I need, as opposed to if I were to go to a fast food joint and crush a hamburger, very calorically dense, not a huge volume of food. And you can probably crush two or three of those, and you may still feel hungry. You may a little later feel like there’s a molten ball of lead in your stomach because they’re so dense, but it’s not the same sated feeling that you get from eating nutritious foods.

So yes, ordered eating is a great approach, especially if you’re looking to lose weight. It is a way that you can curb your cravings for junk food, but it really has nothing to do with your blood sugar levels.

Insulin

And frequently we see insulin get blamed for a lot of things. And that is the common refrain of people that are telling you that you need to be aware of your blood glucose, because the thought is, if my blood sugar spikes, I’m going to have high insulin spikes, it’s going to lead to a slew of problems, and you can see it in the second bullet point here, it’s considered a storage hormone. So, what I want to talk about is what insulin actually does, and why our traditional understanding of it is actually backwards.

So, to dive into that, it’s important to note how insulin was discovered, because the history of it is actually what leads to the backwards understanding of it. It was discovered as the missing piece in type one diabetics. So, in the 1920s, as diabetes was being explored and studied, scientists realized that the hormone insulin was a missing piece that was causing issues in the type one diabetics.

That’s what led to synthetic insulin being supplemented. And when that happened, what scientists saw was blood sugar being funneled from the bloodstream into the cells, and insulin was dubbed to be a storage hormone. So, it is frequently blamed, if I eat a ton of sugars, my insulin’s going to spike, it’s going to shove all the sugars into my cells, and I’m going to get fat because of it. And it’s been blamed, and that’s what led to the low carb craze.

That is not actually what happens in healthy individuals. Normal function for insulin, it’s created in your pancreas, not in type one diabetics, they can’t produce it. And what it does first in normal levels is it prevents the production of glucagon. So, anyone that has ever taken a CrossFit Level 1 certification, when they’re briefly diving into the Zone diet, they talk about two kinds of antagonistic hormones, and it’s an oversimplified relationship between the two.

But basically, what they say is, when you have carbs, insulin arrives, takes the carbs out of the bloodstream, puts it into your muscles and your liver. When you exercise, glucagon is produced, and it mobilizes glucose from your muscle cells in your liver and brings it into the bloodstream. That is an accurate depiction of what glucagon does.

But what insulin does first is it goes from the pancreas to the liver, and it inhibits the production of glucagon. Basically, it’s telling your body, hey, we don’t need to release any sugar from our cells. We don’t need to release it from our muscle cells or from the liver, because there’s already glucose in our bloodstream. We’re good, we’ve got energy, we don’t need to create it from storage. So, it’s an inhibitor rather than a storage hormone. Does the same thing for lipolysis. It shuts down your ability to burn fat because you already have an energy source in the bloodstream. And same goes for muscle protein catabolism.

Basically, it stops your body from creating new energy because it wants to use the energy that’s already there from the food you’ve eaten to fuel everything. So how do you then use the blood sugar that you’ve gotten from a meal? Your everyday life function, exercise, whatever you need energy for. Your brain largely functions on glucose. It is made of fatty tissue, but it burns sugar as its primary fuel source. So only in high levels does insulin lead to storage.

For the vast majority of its function, it is just preventing your body from breaking down its own tissue until the blood glucose that you already have has left. So, it’s unfairly blamed for a lot of things, but it doesn’t actually do what we blame it for. If you are a healthy functioning individual, having high blood glucose will not cause your insulin to shuttle that into your cells, making you fat. It does not work that way.

Blood Glucose (Blood Sugar)

So again, your blood glucose will spike if you eat something sugary. For the most part, we’ll get to that on the next slide. How does it fall? This is why we talk about carb loading for runners. You’re going to burn that energy that is in your bloodstream just by moving, just by living, just by breathing. Typical cellular metabolism will burn glucose first. It is our preferred energy source over fats because it is more readily available. So that’s important to know.

It falls thanks to insulin stopping the production of additional energy. And in people that tend to have issues with blood sugar regulation. Usually there’s an issue with liver where they are not able to produce enough insulin and the body is constantly metabolizing glucose from the muscle cells in the liver and shuttling it into the bloodstream.

So, if I have my cells dumping glucose into my bloodstream on top of the spike I already have from the food I’ve eaten, now I’m going to be elevated for a very long time and I’m going to get a big spike. So, it is the area under the curve that we typically care about rather than how high it spikes in the first place. And this brings up the conversation of chronic elevation versus acute elevation.

Acute elevation doesn’t matter. As long as I return to baseline within five or six hours, you’re fine, there’s not a problem there. And what happens is the influencer that’s pushing the ordered eating has a ton of graphs to show spikes in blood sugar after certain kinds of meals, but all of her graphs stop at two hours out. They don’t show a return to baseline. And once again, it does not matter if I’m elevated for a long time, as long as I return to baseline and I don’t have trouble doing that. If I’m a healthy individual, it really, really does not matter.

If I’m going to go lift weights, it might be better for me to have carbohydrates because then I can keep the stores in my muscles and my liver a little bit longer. And as my intense exercise continues, only then do I start mobilizing the energy as I need it. This is why we talk about fueling athletes properly. Again, a common night before tactic is the carb loading. And that’s really what they’re trying to accomplish.

So, a lot of people are starting to wear these continuous glucose monitors who are not diabetic. If you’re diabetic, all bets are off. You do what you have got to do. But if I am an otherwise healthy individual, it is the area under the curve that matters in a 24 hour period. Two hours is not enough. If I never return to baseline, then I have chronically high levels of blood sugar, and then I’m probably going to run into, probably means that I have an issue with my insulin.

If I am insulin resistant and I’m not sensitive to it, then my body will be continuously mobilizing glucose from my liver and my muscle cells. And that’s, again, what leads to that chronic elevation of blood sugar. So that would be, if you struggle to lose weight and you’ve tracked your calories and you’ve tracked your macros and you’ve done that accurately, then it might be worth exploring blood glucose to see what’s happening. It’s just more data in that case. But if I’m seeing results based on what I’m doing, and maybe I hit a sticking point and I tweak my macros and I do a little bit lower carb and higher fat, and then if that works, perhaps I was a little bit insulin resistant.

If you’ve played with all that, then it might be worth looking into a continuous glucose monitor just to see what’s going on throughout the day. But what we tend to see in this realm is people, once again, demonizing blood sugar and insulin, and essentially creating a problem where there isn’t one. And it’s basically the glycemic index all over again.

Glycemic Index

So, what was the glycemic index? It’s a score of one to 100 that is assigned to various types of food. And it is based on how high those foods spike your blood sugar. a score of 100 is basically you eating glucose. If I were to literally eat sugar, I’m going to have a spike commensurate with 100. And does it matter? No, unless you’re eating a single food. Like if I’m just eating straight up sugar, straight candy, if I’m diabetic, again, I want to be aware of it, but ultimately you blunt the effect of any one food by mixing it with something else.

Again, we’re going back to ordered eating. Yes, it will blunt your blood sugar spikes, but ultimately that doesn’t matter. My favorite example of this is if you mix a sugary substance with anything that has texture, whether it’s protein, fiber, or even fat, you’re going to blunt the spike that you see in blood sugar. So, ice cream is actually fairly low on the glycemic index. You wouldn’t suspect that, given that it’s sweet and it has a high sugar content, but because there’s also protein and fat present, you don’t get quite as much of a spike.

So ultimately when we see people demonizing insulin, demonizing blood sugar, it’s the glycemic index all over again, and this has been thoroughly debunked over the years. It’s another name for this.

Spotting Charlatans

So ultimately, how you can tell somebody’s full of crap is they go out of their way to create a problem where there isn’t one. Why did they do that? So that they can sell you the solution. So as with this fitness influencer, they sell anti-spike pills. I believe it’s apple cider vinegar, or it’s a proprietary blend, or something like that. But ultimately, this person is claiming that having spikes in your blood sugar is a health risk, and then they are selling you the solution to that.

And if you see people creating a problem and selling you a solution, they are probably full of crap. I’ll be upfront with you. I have no problem giving out information for free. My coaching, anybody could take the time to recreate my system. If I do my job correctly, individuals will not need me anymore. They keep coming back because they like the accountability piece, and that’s really the biggest one, is they don’t want to have to think for themselves and do it for themselves.

But there is nothing revolutionary in my approach. I distill things down so that they are understandable, they are manageable, and they get people results largely through compliance, and because I’m not overcomplicating things. I’m very upfront in what I’m selling, and I want you guys, our viewers, to understand when you’re being sold a bill of goods. Nothing is that complicated. It’s all fairly simple. It’s just a matter of doing the simple things.

Instead, a lot of us like to look for scapegoats. I can’t lose the weight that I want to lose, it must be my blood sugar. It’s not my fault. It’s my blood sugar. In most cases, it’s not, and you can take action. Some people don’t like that. They feel like they’re being blamed. I actually like that approach because for me, it’s empowering. It is a mess of my own making; therefore, I am the one with the power to clean it up. I like that approach.

I like to help people who share that idea, and if they need accountability, that’s why they come to us. Then again, we do get people that don’t care to learn this stuff, and if you’re one of them, I’m not really sure why you’re watching this video. Maybe you’re trying to change. In any case, insulin and blood glucose are unfairly demonized. If you are a healthy individual, eat a balanced diet. Blood sugar spikes don’t matter, and I hope this was informative for you. We’ll catch you guys’ next time.

As always, if you enjoyed this content, please give our channel a like, give us a subscribe. We need it for the algorithm. We’re trying to reach as many people as we can. Good information. Catch you guys’ next time.