Jessie Inchauspé: The #1 Diet Change That Will Transform Your Energy & Health | Health and Wellness | E401

Jessie Inchauspé was struggling with her mental health when a glucose monitor revealed something she never expected: her worst days often aligned with bigger glucose spikes. That discovery changed how she ate, pushed her deep into the research, and eventually became the foundation of her work as the Glucose Goddess. In this episode, Jessie breaks down simple daily habits entrepreneurs can use to stabilize their blood sugar, reduce brain fog, improve energy, and support long-term health. She also explains pregnancy nutrition insights for those expecting or planning to have children. In this episode, Hala and Jessie will discuss: (00:00) Introduction (03:24) What Glucose Actually Does to Your Body (06:45) Simple Hacks to Reduce Sugar Spikes (12:50) The Link Between Sugar and Aging (15:14) Hidden Signs of Glucose Spikes (24:15) The Best Order to Eat (26:22) Breaking the Glucose Roller Coaster (28:48) Building a Business From a Niche Idea (40:14) How Pregnancy Diet Shapes a Baby’s Health (54:25) Miscarriage Grief and Emotional Support Jessie Inchauspé is a French biochemist, bestselling author, and founder of Glucose Goddess, a global wellness brand. Best known for her simple hacks to help reduce blood sugar spikes naturally, she translates cutting-edge science into easy, practical tips for improving physical and mental health. Her most recent book, 9 Months That Count Forever, offers science-backed guidance for pregnancy nutrition. Sponsored By: Indeed - Get a $75 sponsored job credit to boost your job's visibility at Indeed.com/profiting Shopify - Start your $1/month trial at Shopify.com/profiting. Quo - Run your business communications the smart way. Try Quo for free, plus get 20% off your first 6 months when you go to quo.com/profiting Remitly - Transfer money internationally across 100+ currencies with no hidden fees. Download the Remitly app or visit remitly.com to get started. Use code BUSINESS to get a $100 bonus after you send $300 or more. New customers only. Prolon - Reset your body with Prolon’s five-day plant-based program. Go to ProlonLife.com/PROFITING for 15% off sitewide plus a $40 bonus gift when you subscribe to their 5-Day Program. Northwest Registered Agent - Get a complete business identity with Northwest. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com/YAPFree and start using free resources to build something amazing. Resources Mentioned: Jessie’s Website: glucosegoddess.com Jessie’s Instagram: instagram.com/glucosegoddess Jessie’s Books, 9 Months That Count Forever: bit.ly/JI-9MTCF Glucose Revolution: bit.ly/JI-GlucoseRevolution The Glucose Goddess Method: bit.ly/JI-GlucoseGodess Active Deals - youngandprofiting.com/deals Key YAP Links Reviews - ratethispodcast.com/yap YouTube - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting Newsletter - youngandprofiting.co/newsletter LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala/ Social + Podcast Services: yapmedia.com Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com/episodes-new Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurship Podcast, Business, Business Podcast, Self Improvement, Self-Improvement, Personal Development, Starting a Business, Strategy, Investing, Sales, Selling, Psychology, Productivity, Entrepreneurs, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Marketing, Negotiation, Money, Finance, Side Hustle, Startup, Mental Health, Career, Leadership, Mindset, Health, Growth Mindset, Biohacking, Motivation, Manifestation, Brain Health, Life Balance, Self-Healing, Positivity, Happiness, Sleep

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Hala Taha?

  Today's episode is sponsored in part by HeyGen, Shopify, Life at the Speed of Play, and Indeed. HeyGen helps you create AI avatar videos without constantly being behind the camera. Get your first three videos free at heygen.com/profitting. Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you grow your business. Start your $1 per month trial at Shopify.com/profitting. Life at the Speed of Play by Mark Pincus helps entrepreneurs quickly test ideas and find the ones worth pursuing. Get two books for the price of one at GetMark'sBook.com/Yap. Indeed helps you attract, interview, and hire all in one place. Get a $75 sponsored job credit to boost your job's visibility at Indeed.com/podcast.

• 0:45Hala Taha?

  As always, you can find all of our incredible deals in the show notes or at YoungAndProfiting.com/deals.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  Glucose impacts you even if you don't have diabetes. You cannot have a healthy body and mind if you're constantly spiking your glucose levels without knowing it.

• 1:03Speaker 02

  Jessie Inchausse, also known as the Glucose Goddess, is a French influencer and a New York Times bestselling author. She's known for simplifying the science of blood sugar and helping millions build healthier habits.

• 1:15Speaker 01

  Human beings, from the moment we are born, we slowly cook like the chicken in the oven. It's called glycation. And the more glucose you have, the faster glycation happens.

• 1:27Hala Taha?

  What are the common things that people think is normal that's actually not normal?

• 1:32Speaker 01

  It's 10 a.m. and you already feel tired. That's not because of your sleep, that's because of your breakfast. Being on a glucose roller coaster affects your brain. It affects your mood. You can be more agitated, more easily irritated. It can increase brain fog. Of course, it can increase chronic fatigue. So if your only focus is you want a bit more performance, then learning how to manage your glucose levels is fundamental.

• 1:55Hala Taha?

  How should we think about it? Like, what food should we completely avoid? And what are some good substitutes?

• 2:00Speaker 01

  So the simplest one to do is...

• 2:04Hala Taha?

  Yap fam, my guest today is Jessie Anchoce, better known as the Glucose Goddess. She's a biochemist, bestselling author, and one of the leading voices making blood sugar science simple and practical. Jessie is here to break down how glucose and the way we eat shape our energy, cravings, focus, mood, aging, and long-term health. We'll also touch on her new book, Nine Months That Count Forever, and how she built a huge brand around a highly specific niche. Now, I know today's episode might feel a little different from what we usually cover, but trust me, the lessons are incredibly relevant. So grab a snack, make it a savory one if you can, and stay tuned. And one tiny favor before we get into it, don't let the algorithm decide when you get your next dose of Young and Profiting Podcast.

• 2:48Hala Taha?

  Follow Yap now so we stay connected each and every single week. Jessie, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast.

• 2:55Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me, Hannah.

• 2:56Hala Taha?

  Typically, we're talking about business and marketing and sales, but especially like these days, I've been really getting into these health conversations. And you've been so popular online. I see your reels all the time on Instagram. You've got like 6 million followers, and you are known as the Glucose Goddess. So the thing that got you super famous on the internet is all your science around glucose and you know, how to minimize glucose spikes and how to eat food in the right order and all the things that you talk about online. So for people who are not familiar, who only hear glucose in the context of, let's say, diabetes, what is glucose, why do we need it? You know, what are the main things we need to know about it?

• 3:40Speaker 01

  So glucose is your body's favorite source of energy. So right now, your brain, your heart, your feet, your liver, they're all burning glucose for energy. So it's the fuel of life. And as humans, the way we give glucose to our body is simply by eating foods that contain glucose. And the big family of these foods is called carbohydrates. So that means things like bread, pasta, rice, potatoes, but also chocolate cake, banana, apple pies. Those are carbs, and these contain glucose. The thing is, a little bit of glucose is fantastic, but too much glucose.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  Can cause some issues. It's a little bit like, do you have any plants at home that you take care of? Yeah. Okay, so you probably know, and I'm a terrible plant owner, but you gotta give them a little bit of water. But if you give them too much water, then it's it's an issue and they drown and yada, yada. And I lost many plants to this. Well, the human body is the same. A little bit of glucose, amazing. Your cells are running, you have energy, you feel good. Too much glucose, your cells start to stress out and bad things start happening. So some of the most common symptoms of having a lot of glucose, the most famous one is diabetes. But diabetes is not the only world in which glucose matters.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  So from about fifteen years ago, scientists have discovered that glucose impacts you even if you don't have diabetes. If you have glucose spikes, which means eating a meal that's very high in carbs, these spikes that happen after you eat can lead to inflammation, to stress inside your cells, can lead to a higher risk of cardiovascular disease, can lead to more cravings, can increase your risk for brain fog, for depression, and long term for things like Alzheimer's disease, can impact your hormones as a female, could increase testosterone in a female body, which can then lead to polycystic ovary syndrome.

• 5:41Speaker 01

  Basically, having a lot of glucose spikes on a daily basis, even if you don't have diabetes, can lead to symptoms. So we should all care about our glucose levels, even if our only objective is to have more energy, to see better, and to have fewer cravings. You cannot have a healthy body and mind if you're constantly spiking your glucose levels without knowing it. And that basically formed the basis of my work. And I discovered this whole thing because I personally suffered from a lot of mental health issues in my twenties. And I saw this correlation between mental health symptoms and glucose spikes, by wearing a glucose monitor completely randomly when I was working in Silicon Valley.

• 6:25Speaker 01

  And so all that to say that I've now dedicated my career to helping people manage their glucose levels.

• 6:31Hala Taha?

  So when I think about sugar, like I feel like everybody knows like certain sugars are bad. Like everybody knows like if you eat a cookie, it's bad. If you're eating ice cream, it's bad. You know, even bread is bad. But then there's other things that have sugar, like for example, like now in my coffee, I use monk sugar. And in my head, I'm like, this is good for me. This is fine. Or honey, right?

• 6:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:53Hala Taha?

  So is there a case of like certain sugars are better than other sugars? Or is that just nonsense that we're telling ourselves?

• 7:01Speaker 01

  So there's two categories. There's, so when you say monk sugar, you're talking about monk fruit?

• 7:06Hala Taha?

  Yes, yeah.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  Okay, good. So that, even though it kind of sounds like a sugar, that's actually a sweetener. That doesn't contain any sugar. So I categorize these things into two worlds. So you have the sugars, which actually contain glucose molecules. And that's white sugar, brown sugar, honey, agave, maple syrup. Um, all of those things. And then you have the sweeteners that are usually very, very low in calories and don't contain actual sugar. So stevia, or spartan, monk fruit, all of those guys.

• 7:36Hala Taha?

  Okay.

• 7:36Speaker 01

  Now, if we look at the sugar world, it's all pretty much the same. It's the same molecules. In honey, it's the same molecules. And in table sugar, yes, honey has some antioxidants, but it's still very, very high in sugar. So when it comes to those sugars, like if you prefer maple syrup, or if you prefer honey, or coconut sugar, have whichever one you want, because they're pretty much the same. Now, if we're talking about sweeteners, some are really not great for our health. That's gonna be things like maltatole, spartan. And then what you mentioned monk fruit is actually seems pretty neutral and seems to be a good option if you want the sweetness without the glucose spike. So it's a bit more nuanced. But um, what I really care about is the fact that things like honey and agave

• 8:20Speaker 01

  are marketed to be super, super healthy, when actually they're just the same molecules as a regular table sugar, but nobody tells you.

• 8:27Hala Taha?

  So what's the easiest, like, like, how should we think about it? Like, what food should we completely avoid? And what are some good substitutes?

• 8:35Speaker 01

  I'm not gonna make you happy because I'm gonna say no foods are off the table. But

• 8:39Hala Taha?

  Okay.

• 8:40Speaker 01

  there's, there's really simple hacks you can put in place that when you do eat something that's high in sugar, it doesn't spike your glucose as much. So the simplest one to do is to avoid sugar on an empty stomach. So avoid an orange juice, a chocolate bar first thing in the morning. Avoid honey first thing in the morning. If you want sweet stuff, have it as dessert after a meal. So after your lunch or after your dinner. Why? Because when your stomach is empty, those molecules of sugar are gonna arrive much more quickly into your bloodstream. Therefore, you're gonna experience a bigger glucose spike, which leads to a faster inflammation, faster aging, and then after a big spike comes a big drop. And so two hours later, you want more sugar because of that drop.

• 9:26Speaker 01

  Now, same sugar, same honey, same table sugar, if you have it after a meal, because there's other foods in your stomach, the sugar is slowed down. Therefore, it arrives more slowly into your bloodstream. Therefore, you don't get such a big spike nor a big drop. So you get fewer symptoms and you're less likely to trigger this sort of craving roller coaster and this addiction to sugar that lasts all day. And then it's ten PM and you've had twenty-five cookies and you're wondering how you got there. Well, maybe it's because your breakfast was sugar on an empty stomach and your body's been on a roller coaster ever since. So that's top tip when you eat sugar.

• 10:03Hala Taha?

  And one of the things that I know that you advise is to have a savory breakfast instead of a sugary breakfast. So, well, tell us the difference of like somebody's day who had a sugary breakfast versus a savory breakfast.

• 10:15Speaker 01

  Well, what do you have for breakfast?

• 10:17Hala Taha?

  I barely eat breakfast. I usually don't eat till like twelve, but if I do, I usually have yogurt, granola, and fruit is usually what I have, and I have it at like eleven or twelve. Um, or I'll make scrambled eggs and fruit.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  You don't have to have breakfast early in the morning. For me, breakfast is just the first meal of the day that should be savory.

• 10:36Hala Taha?

  Okay.

• 10:37Speaker 01

  So why do we wanna avoid a sweet first meal of the day, no matter what time that is? Because your stomach is empty. It's so simple. And so if You eat something like a piece of toast with jam and then a tea with honey or an orange juice or a fruit smoothie. All of these are very high in sugar and glucose. That glucose is going to arrive really quickly. Big spike, fatigue, inflammation, aging, and then big drop three hours later. And it's 10 a.m. and you already feel tired. That's not because of your sleep, that's because of your breakfast. And there's this misconception that if we eat something sweet in the morning, it's going to give us energy. That an orange juice is going to give us energy. What it actually does is that the sweet taste triggers dopamine in the brain. Dopamine is a molecule of enjoyment.

• 11:22Speaker 01

  It makes us feel good, but on the inside in our cells, our cells are struggling with this big glucose spike and cannot make energy efficiently. So if you want stable glucose levels throughout the day, the tip is very simple. Have a savory breakfast built around protein. Protein does not contain any glucose. It does not spike our glucose levels. It keeps us very, very steady and it keeps us feeling very full. So a perfect example is some eggs, or you mentioned some Greek yogurt. It can be leftovers, it can be fish, meat, it can be tofu, protein powder. This should be the main character of your breakfast, the centerpiece of your breakfast. And then you can add stuff.

• 12:05Speaker 01

  You can add some fruit, whole fruits, you can add a bit of starch. As long as the core of your breakfast is built around protein, it's going to keep your glucose level steady. And this transforms your day completely. And I recommend to always try to start with switching to a savory breakfast, even though it can be quite hard for people. It is honestly one of the most powerful things to do for your entire day. It's remarkable the impact that it has.

• 12:31Hala Taha?

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• 13:15Hala Taha?

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• 13:40Hala Taha?

  What's up Yap gang? I recently had Gary Vee on the podcast and he told me something that really stuck with me. If you've got sales DNA, you've got to be paying attention to live selling because it's one of the biggest opportunities right now online. And that really got me curious. So I checked out an app that he told me about called Whatnot. I jumped into a live show and I instantly got it. The seller was showing products in real time, answering questions in the chat, and building a real relationship with the buyers. It didn't feel like boring shopping. It felt like a community. Whatnot is the largest live shopping marketplace in the country. And for entrepreneurs, the results are really hard to ignore. Sellers on Whatnot can sell up to 10 times more than traditional marketplaces. And the number of sellers making over a million dollars a year on the platform has doubled.

• 14:25Hala Taha?

  So if you've got products to sell and you're looking for a new way to reach customers, search Whatnot, W-H-A-T-N-O-T, in the App Store. Download it and you can start selling right away. That's Whatnot in the App Store.

• 14:39Hala Taha?

  What's up Yap fam? You guys know we love reading on this show. So I'm always excited when I find a book I genuinely think is worth sharing. Life at the Speed of Play: Launch Products People Love by Mark Pincus is one of those books. Mark is a legendary Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor. And this fast-paced 170-page book is his playbook for testing ideas quickly, navigating uncertainty, and figuring out what to do. Figuring out what's actually worth pursuing. One of my favorite concepts is what he calls the abyss. Those moments when you feel stuck or unsure of what's next. Instead of fearing uncertainty, he shows you how to use it as a tool for discovery. Right now, Mark is doing a buy one, get one offer for Yap listeners.

• 15:23Hala Taha?

  Go to getmarksbook.com/yap, buy one copy for $32 and get a second copy free. So you can keep one for yourself and give the second to a friend, future co-founder, or someone who needs a little push. Now, I might be vain or something, but the thing that really moves the needle for me when it comes to health is when somebody says like, this is gonna age you faster, like, don't do this. That's always when I pay attention the most. So you've mentioned aging quite a few times. So what does sugar and glucose do in terms of aging?

• 15:54Speaker 01

  Well, do you know when you cook something in the oven? It goes from like raw to brown? So you put a chicken in the oven and it goes from pink to brown? So that process is called glycation. And it's basically the process of aging. And human beings, from the moment we are born, we slowly glycate. We slowly cook like the chicken in the oven. No joke, girl. No joke. It's called glycation. And it happens everywhere in our body, on our skin, inside of our organs. And when our skin glycates, it hurts our collagen, we get wrinkles. When our organs glycate, they work as well. And then as we age, we glycate more and more. And then when we're fully glycated, we die. That's basically what happens, in a nutshell.

• 16:40Speaker 01

  And you might notice that glycation and glucose sound pretty similar, like they come from the same roots, and it's because they do. And it's because it is glucose that does the glycating. And the more glucose you have in your body, the faster glycation happens. And so if you're talking about aging of the skin, right? Which is one of the core things we think about when we think about aging. So collagen in your skin gets glycated. And the more glucose you have in your body, the faster that collagen is glycating. And when collagen is glycated, it becomes brittle and it breaks. And so that can lead to sagging skin and wrinkles over time. And so I'm not saying like one piece of cake is gonna make you look super old.

• 17:23Speaker 01

  But over days, weeks, months and years, if you had twice as many glucose spikes as your neighbor, you might look older than him, even though the rest of your lives are the same. So that's one of the ways in which um food and glucose are related to skin health. Another one is inflammation. So every glucose spike increases inflammation in in the body. And inflammation can also exacerbate things like acne, rosacea, psoriasis, and just generally make your skin feel, look more dull.

• 17:53Hala Taha?

  Mm hmm.

• 17:53Speaker 01

  So yeah, it's important to think about food when, if you want your skin to look young and healthy for a very long time. And glucose is a great place to start.

• 18:01Hala Taha?

  Now, what about somebody who's just like, I'm fine. I don't feel like I have glucose spikes. Like, what are the common things that people think is normal that's actually not normal?

• 18:11Speaker 01

  Um, well, first of all, if you feel amazing and you don't think anything in your life could be improved, that's awesome, and don't listen to me. But if you think any little piece of your physical or mental health could go a little bit better, then glucose might be the good place to start. So some common things are that people think are normal, but are actually might be glucose spikes in disguise. Hitting the three P M. wall. So at two P M. feeling super tired, like you need a coffee or soda or a nap. And I used to think that was just normal. Um, poor sleep. So if you have a lot of glucose spikes and dips and you go to bed on a big glucose spike, you'll have less deep sleep.

• 18:53Speaker 01

  And so you wake up and you don't feel rested, even though you slept, you know, seven or eight hours. That's a very common, common symptom. And another very common one is sugar addiction. So by sugar addiction, I mean that throughout the day, multiple times, you're thinking, mm, I want to eat something sweet. I don't care what it is, I just want something sweet. It be it's a granola bar, maybe it's a chocolate, I just need something sweet. Now, this could be driven by glucose crash because the meal you had a few hours earlier led to a spike and then a crash. So, poor sleep, poor energy, um, and feeling controlled by sugar, those are pretty common symptoms of glucose spikes.

• 19:33Hala Taha?

  Let, let's talk about that addiction. Um, I actually just went to New York to visit my mom for Mother's Day and I had a total cheat weekend. We were like, you know, eating cookies and cupcakes and yesterday I was hanging out with my boyfriend and it was like 10pm and I was like, do you wanna, and I'm usually eating very healthy. I'm like, do you want to order ice cream? And he's like, why, why do you want ice cream? Like, this is random. And I'm like, I don't know, I just, I just like feel like it. Maybe it's because I ate so many sweets this weekend. Is there any truth to that? Do you, does your body just keep wanting it once you've kind of indulged?

• 20:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, because it's a very powerful stimulant on the brain. And so, more sugar you eat, more sugar you think about and you want. And then if you combine that to the fact that you're experiencing a spike and a dip, you can also have this biological urge of like, I need sugar right now. So, both of these things can be going on. And have you ever made the experience of like stopping sugar completely for a week and then you don't even think about it anymore?

• 20:31Hala Taha?

  Yeah, yeah. Like, it's like if you don't have sweets for a while, then like you just don't want them. And then suddenly you bring it back and every day you're like, I want a sweet, I want a sweet.

• 20:39Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 20:40Hala Taha?

  How do we stop, how do we stop that cycle?

• 20:42Speaker 01

  So, the key is not to try to use your willpower. Like, that's not gonna work. Uh, I think there's two things you can do. So, first thing is, when you want something sweet, try to have some whole fruit and then wait 20 minutes. And if you still want the ice cream, then have the ice cream. But the best first thing, the, the first, uh, sort of gate to try is whole fruit. Because whole fruit is sweet, but also contains fiber and water, so it doesn't create a glucose spike. And then if you really want to have, um, the ice cream, which by the way, I Totally relate to. Use the glucose hacks so that it doesn't create an extra craving cycle. So as I mentioned, not never an empty stomach. You can have some vinegar before you have the sugar.

• 21:25Speaker 01

  So one tablespoon of vinegar in a big glass of water like this.

• 21:29Hala Taha?

  Like apple cider vinegar or like?

• 21:31Speaker 01

  Apple cider vinegar, white wine vinegar. Um, you just want to avoid the sort of very syrupy balsamic vinegar. But this can reduce the glucose spike of that sugar by up to thirty percent. Because it slows down the breakdown of sugar in your stomach. So you're still having the the enjoyment from the sugar with less of an impact on your glucose levels. So with less of a creation of that cycle. And another thing that's very powerful that you can do is that after you eat sugar, use your muscles. So if you're in front of the TV, pick up a water bottle and do some bicep curls. Do some calf raises like at the couch, you know? Clean your apartment, do some laundry. Activating your muscles after you eat sugar is so powerful because they want glucose for energy as they contract.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  And the first place they look is in your bloodstream. They look for glucose you just ate. So for example, if I ate the same chocolate cake on two different days, but one day after that chocolate cake, I went for a ten minute walk, it would create a much smaller spike than if I just sat down after eating it. So if you use all these little combos, over time the spikes come down. So you're not creating that biological crash. And probably you're not going to keep eating as much sugar as you did in New York, right? Maybe you were eating sugar like every few hours and now you're doing it in the evening for ice cream. And so over time, this is going to attenuate and you're not going to feel that craving anymore.

• 22:53Hala Taha?

  Yeah, so you were just kind of explaining how fruit compared to ice cream is like a better kind of glucose or easier to manage.

• 23:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:03Hala Taha?

  Help us understand, like, I know I asked you this question right off the bat, but like, like, I don't, I feel like I don't quite understand still. Like, what is a good, like, what is a good sugar versus a bad sugar? And like for you, for example, like, how often are you eating fruit? Like, how often are you, are you like trying to stay away from fruit or are you?

• 23:22Speaker 01

  No, I don't, I don't try to stay away from food, so. Fruit and a chocolate bar, they actually contain the same sugar molecules. It's the same thing for your body, but there's one massive difference, which is that in the fruit, there's fiber and there's water. So even though there is some sugar in there, it comes in this very healthy package that is gonna break down slowly, that is gonna arrive into your bloodstream slowly. And also, there's much less sugar in an apple than in a chocolate bar, right? So you have less sugar and a better envelope, a better matrix. And so I have whole fruit every single day, honestly. Um, whole fruit is still there for enjoyment, for pleasure. Like, we don't need to eat fruit.

• 24:06Speaker 01

  There's no, nothing in fruit that we can't find in vegetables, for example. But fruit is so lovely to eat and it's, it's delicious, it's sweet, it's enjoyable. So I still see fruit as dessert, right? I'm doing it because I want to, because I like it. Um, but it's a totally fine and healthy thing to eat. However, there's something really fascinating to, to know about is that the fruit that we have today in supermarkets has been, um, modified and bred by humans over centuries to be even more sweet and juicy as the way nature intended. So if you look at what a banana looked like, you know, thousands and thousands of years ago, it was full of seeds, not very sweet and quite hard to eat.

• 24:50Speaker 01

  And today, a banana is like super easy to peel and it's very sweet. So humans have designed modern fruit to be higher in sugar. Yet, the same thing still holds. Because of the fiber and the water, they're still fine for your health and you do ghost devils. The problem comes if we denature whole fruit. So if we make an apple juice or an orange juice, what are we doing? We are stripping away the fiber and throwing it in the bin. And we're just keeping the sugar and the water. And in that case, that becomes something that is really not very good for you. Because we're concentrating the sugar of like five oranges in one glass,

• 25:32Speaker 01

  and we're removing the fiber. So that protective healthy matrix that I told you about is gone. It's vanished. And you're just left with the same sugar molecules as in a can of Coca-Cola in the same amounts. And so sure, there's a bit of vitamins in there, but like, not enough to outweigh the huge amount of sugar that is in that juice. So it's not so much about like, is there good sugar or bad sugar? It's more there is good envelopes and bad envelopes, for sure. And the only thing that is very sweet and that you can eat unlimited is whole fruit. The rest should always be seen as dessert and something you do for your enjoyment and pleasure and something you build glucose hacks around.

• 26:11Hala Taha?

  I feel like that's a really good reframe, like, understanding that whole fruits are good because of the envelope that you were talking about.

• 26:18Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 26:18Hala Taha?

  And then also like that you treat it like a dessert, like you know you don't have to eat it. But if you're going to have something sweet, you're gonna opt for fruit. So I think like reframing and like make sure you're not denaturing it like you mentioned. So I think those are great.

• 26:31Speaker 01

  When you were mentioning you have, you said fruit and granola and yogurt for breakfast or your first meal of the day, right? Okay, so in that meal, the fruit and the granola tend to be sweet, but because you have the yogurt, you also reduce the glucose spike. And you don't need that fruit in the morning, right, your first meal of the day, but it's enjoyable. And we should also think about things we do for enjoyment. Life is not all about just reducing sugar and being sad. Like, we need to eat sweet stuff because it's tasty.

• 26:59Hala Taha?

  Now, let me ask you a question about that breakfast. Would it make more sense if I was like, let me just have this Greek yogurt plain? And maybe, or like, the granola that I have actually doesn't have any sweet in it. It's like grossly nuts and stuff like that. So like, let's say I have the granola, like the nutty granola, and the Greek yogurt, and then I have the fruit after. Is that better? Or like, that doesn't matter, like, to have that level of like granularity of how you eat?

• 27:24Speaker 01

  So, in order to answer that question, we gotta talk about the order in which we eat our food.

• 27:29Hala Taha?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 27:30Speaker 01

  There is fascinating study that came out that has been since replicated many times that shows that during a meal, the order in which you eat the food matters in terms of the glucose spike that the meal creates. And the scientists found that the, quote, "ideal order for your glucose levels is the following: vegetables first, Then proteins and fats, and then starches and sugars. Why? Because vegetables contain fiber. And as I mentioned, fiber is our friend. Fiber will create this sort of mesh and slow down how quickly glucose arrives into our bloodstream. And why do we want to eat the carbs and sugars last? Because same concept, when there's food already in our belly when we eat carbs,

• 28:14Speaker 01

  they arrive more slowly into our blood. So technically, if you wanted to be like, super, super, super highly optimized, yes, eating the berries after you had the yogurt and the nuts would be better than mixing them. But honestly, girl, like, the difference is gonna be pretty small because that meal is not very high in glucose anyway. And I don't think you need to do that, like unless you really want to, but eating stuff mixed is totally fine. You have a lot of protein in there, healthy fats, a little bit of whole fruit, it's fine. If you told me my meal, my breakfast is um five cookies and a yogurt, I'd be like, okay, yeah.

• 28:58Speaker 01

  Definitely don't have the cookies first, like have the yogurt first and then the cookies. It's always relative, but in your case, I don't think you have to worry about it.

• 29:08Hala Taha?

  What's up, Yap gang? I recently had Gary Vee on the podcast and he told me something that really stuck with me. If you've got sales DNA, you've got to be paying attention to live selling because it's one of the biggest opportunities right now online. And that really got me curious, so I checked out an app that he told me about called Whatnot. I jumped into a live show and I instantly got it. The seller was showing products in real time, answering questions in the chat, and building a real relationship with the buyers. It didn't feel like boring shopping. It felt like a community. Whatnot is the largest live shopping marketplace in the country. And for entrepreneurs, the results are really hard to ignore. Sellers on Whatnot can sell up to 10 times more than traditional marketplaces. And the number of sellers making over a million dollars a year on the platform has doubled.

• 29:52Hala Taha?

  So if you've got products to sell and you're looking for a new way to reach customers, search Whatnot, W H A T N O T, in the App Store. Download it and you can start selling right away. That's Whatnot in the App Store.

• 30:07Hala Taha?

  What's up, Yap fam? You guys know we love reading on this show, so I'm always excited when I find a book I genuinely think is worth sharing. "Life at the Speed of Play: Launch Products People Love" by Mark Pincus is one of those books. Mark is a legendary Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor, and this fast-paced 170-page book is his playbook for testing ideas quickly, navigating uncertainty, and figuring out what's actually worth pursuing. One of my favorite concepts is what he calls "the abyss," those moments when you feel stuck or unsure of what's next. Instead of fearing uncertainty, he shows you how to use it as a tool for discovery. Right now, Mark is doing a buy-one-get-one offer for Yap listeners.

• 30:51Hala Taha?

  Go to getmarksbook.com/yap, buy one copy for $32, and get a second copy free, so you can keep one for yourself and give the second to a friend, future co-founder, or someone who needs a little push.

• 31:07Hala Taha?

  Hello, young and profiteers. If you're running a business, getting website traffic is only half the battle. The real key to profiting is turning those visitors into paying customers. And I know checkout friction can quietly kill your sales. That's why I always say, "serious entrepreneurs build on Shopify." Shopify is a commerce platform that helps you launch and run an online store without needing to be super technical. You can build your storefront, manage your business, and make it easy for people to buy. And here's the major advantage: Shopify Checkout with Shop Pay converts up to 36% higher than the competition. With Black Friday coming up, now's the time to get your store ready and simplify your checkout experience. If you're ready to launch your business before Black Friday,

• 31:51Hala Taha?

  go to Shopify.com/profitting to start your free trial. That's Shopify.com/profitting. Go to Shopify.com/profitting today to hear your first... Can you talk to us about what a glucose roller coaster is?

• 32:07Speaker 01

  A glucose roller coaster is experiencing glucose spikes and crashes, spikes and crashes, the whole day. So you have a sweet breakfast, you spike, then naturally your body's gonna bring down your glucose levels. And then if you have a big spike, you're gonna have a big crash. And that's the first section of the roller coaster, the first wave of the roller coaster. And then when you crash, this actually activates a part of your brain that tells you to look for more sugar. And so you're gonna reach for a super sweet granola bar. And then you're gonna spike again. So the roller coaster is going back up. And then over the next two hours, your body's gonna bring down that spike by storing away

• 32:48Speaker 01

  glucose into your cells. But a big spike means more cravings and more activation. And so if all day you do spike, crash, spike, crash, cycle, you're stuck in this fatigue, exhaustion, sugar addiction. The cool thing is, every morning at breakfast, you have the opportunity every single day to reset that glucose roller coaster. Your breakfast is extremely important as to whether you're gonna be on a glucose roller coaster that day or not. So if you suspect that you might be on one because you crave sugar throughout the day and you feel super tired, tomorrow morning, have a savory breakfast built around

• 33:30Speaker 01

  protein, nothing sweet except some whole fruit if you want, and see how different you feel. Odds are, you will be spending your very first day not on a glucose roller coaster. And I can tell you, that feels amazing. And you get your life and your time and your brain back. If your audience cares about brain health, performance, energy, this also matters a lot. So being on a glucose roller coaster affects your brain, it affects your mood, it can affect how you behave with those around you. You can be more agitated, more easily irritated, it can increase brain fog, of course, it can increase chronic fatigue for the reasons I just mentioned. So if your only focus is you want a bit more performance

• 34:15Speaker 01

  and a bit more even keel, then learning how to manage your glucose levels is fundamental. And in my book, Glucose Revolution, I have many more hacks and more science, and it's honestly a really, really good place to start.

• 34:27Hala Taha?

  All right, so let's transition into talking about your business. So one of the most fascinating things I found about you is that you've got a big following, right? We're talking about 6 million followers just on Instagram. You're on all these other platforms. And your main thing that you talked about for a long time was glucose. And in my like, marketing brain, that's really niche. You're not just talking about health or women's health. You're talking about glucose. Now, everybody, you know, needs to worry about what they eat and everybody needs to eat. So I guess it is broad, but it is still really niche. So talk to us about how you landed on that? And if like, you like, how you were like, okay, I'm gonna stick with glucose and be the glucose goddess?

• 35:11Speaker 01

  Okay, so first of all, glucose is niche, but it's actually a very simple window through which to view nutrition as a whole. So it sounds super niche, but it's your glucose levels are a representation of how much fat you're eating, how much protein you're eating, of your exercise levels, of how much sugar you're eating, how many carbs you're eating. So they reflect an entire diet. So that's why it's cool and it's helpful. It's a niche molecule, but it actually represents a lot about somebody's lifestyle. So how did I get into this? How did I decide to do this? Personal journey, mental health issues, wasn't sure I had to do better. I was working at 23andMe in Silicon Valley for five years as a product manager. Super fascinated by that whole journey, yeah?

• 35:56Speaker 01

  And I had the opportunity to put on a glucose monitor. Somebody in the company sent an email being like, hey, we have these glucose monitors. Does anybody wanna try? And I just raised my hand out of curiosity. And it changed my life because I saw that the days where I had bigger glucose spikes, my mental health was worse. And I was struggling with depersonalization, depression, anxiety since I was 19, after breaking my back and having intense surgery. So I personally got fascinated by it. I read all the studies. I changed the way I was eating and I was like, this is super freaking cool. And then, because I think I'm just wired this way, I wanted to extend this to those around me. And so I thought, if I just print out these scientific studies and give them to my mom and my friends, nobody's gonna care.

• 36:40Speaker 01

  I need to find a visual way to explain why it's so important to manage your glucose levels, regardless of our medical situation. And I thought about making these graphs. So I literally coded on my computer, this little digitizer that took screenshots of the glucose monitor, turned it into this pretty graph that I made, I designed everything. And these graphs, when I showed my friends and my colleagues, man, they got it. And these graphs were simply showing the glucose spike of, for example, an orange versus an orange juice. And you can see in just a second, oh, the orange juice is a bigger spike, that's worse. And then I decided to put a little bit on Instagram, just because I wanted to help people, you know?

• 37:22Speaker 01

  And I thought, I'm gonna give myself six months and try to make the best post I possibly can. And because I had a product manager mindset, I saw these graphs as a feature that I was continuously testing every single day. So I had a ton of iterations of these graphs and I was seeing what was catching on or not. And after six months, I had like a thousand followers, I thought, this is it, girl, I gotta go. And so I quit turning to me and I decided to do the glucose thing full time. But I had no business plan, I had no, I had no idea what I was doing. And because I was in Silicon Valley, everybody said, Jesse, make a deck and go raise a million dollars. And I was like, but I don't wanna build an app, like I wanna make content and educate.

• 38:05Speaker 01

  And so I was about to stop doing this six months later because I had no more savings, when I had the opportunity to write a book. So my book agent saw my work, reached out and said, I think you should write a book. And I never thought about writing a book, but I did. And that's when things started to sort of snowball after that book came out.

• 38:26Speaker 01

  I got, you know, media and press and people were sharing more and more of the glucose graphs on Instagram. And then years later, I decided to build a business out of it, to have a recipe club, to have a formulation of a supplement I developed, to do more books, to do more products. But it all came very organically. I never raised any money, it was all bootstrap, it was all, you know, one, one foot after the other. So, um, there was no deck, there were no Silicon Valley investors. I did take meetings and I was like, this is not for me. So, yeah.

• 38:56Hala Taha?

  I love that you

• 38:57Speaker 01

  Does that answer your question?

• 38:58Hala Taha?

  It totally does. And I always talk, I love creator, you know, I'm a creator entrepreneur. Creator entrepreneurship is awesome. I believe that is the future. I believe that is the way that you can really build big businesses now without taking funding because your personal brand is your audience. Now, one of the things that like really like, you know, is eye opening for me is that you started with these graphs. Like, a lot of people like start with their face. You started with these graphs that you perfected that people really loved and people kind of got trained on. Did you have any like insecurities about going on camera? Or like, how was it for you to actually, because now you're on camera all the time? How was it for you to to get in front of the camera?

• 39:39Speaker 01

  No, I have never been insecure in front of a camera. And I I credit my mother for taking so many photos of my sister and I when we were growing up. As soon as a camera comes out, I'm like, yes, hi. That was, that was a big advantage. And so I was posting the graphs, but I was also posting selfies. I was trying different things. And I very quickly started making also some videos to complement the graphs. So I didn't have that hurdle of feeling like, oh, I feel uncomfortable, you know, taking photos and videos. I think that really helped. Because I know this can, this can be a real barrier to to many people. Because it is weird to put yourself out there. But I just did not care. I was like, I'm gonna use my face to talk about glucose and to help people. One thing I didn't do, though,

• 40:21Speaker 01

  is I never shared my personal life, where I lived, who my friends were, what I was doing. I was not going to be an influencer. I was going to be a science teacher on the internet. And that's all I talk about. It's just the narrow science thing. There's nothing else.

• 40:37Hala Taha?

  Till this, till this day, you don't, you don't incorporate person. Oh, that's really interesting. Because a lot of people say you have to incorporate your personal life. Why do you think that works for you? Why other people kind of say you've got to be personal? So people really connect with you and?

• 40:51Speaker 01

  Why does that work for me? Because my whole purpose, my whole brand is educating about science. I'm, I'm a science teacher. And that has always been the case. And so I think the people who follow me, that's what they follow me for. And if I started posting about, you know, maybe some people will be a bit curious, but I don't think it would work on my platform if I started posting about my vacations. I think people will be like, who cares? Give us some studies.

• 41:16Hala Taha?

  Yeah, yeah, that's a brand that you've created. Yeah, you're an educator.

• 41:19Speaker 01

  Totally. I'm an educator. Yeah, I'm not a, in my books, I get pretty personal. I talk a lot about. My personal life and stories because I think it adds a lot to what I'm trying to communicate. But it was also a choice to protect myself, to be honest. And today, considering the amount of articles and media stuff that are written about me, thank God, people don't know who my husband is or where I live because it would be a nightmare. So I'm very happy with that decision, very, very happy with it. But I think it forces.

• 41:49Hala Taha?

  Well, I feel like you do tell your story, to your point, in your books and like your long-form podcasts. Like you do tell your story, but it's just not like your core on social media, the things that go viral.

• 41:59Speaker 01

  I share the things that are relevant to the message I'm trying to give and to the service I'm trying to provide. But I don't think it's relevant for me to talk about, you know,

• 42:12Speaker 01

  I don't know, people talk about on the internet.

• 42:14Hala Taha?

  Yeah, their food, like whatever. Yeah, exactly, their kids.

• 42:17Speaker 01

  I do post my food though. But to me, it's very clear in my head, like what makes sense and what doesn't make sense. And it's always, it's always been a decision.

• 42:25Hala Taha?

  Well, that's super, super fascinating. So let's talk about how you make money as a creator. You mentioned some of the ways that you, you make money as a creator. What is like your biggest revenue generator? Do you actually make money from your book? Or is it more of like the speaking off your book? And how do you make money right now as a creator?

• 42:40Speaker 01

  I've been very lucky that my books have done very well. So my books have sold three million copies in forty-two languages. So that's been a big, big, real business for me. And I think, yeah, thank you. And I think it's because, you know, I pour a huge amount of work into the books. Like the books are not something I do on the side. It's most of the grueling work I do every year is research for books. So the books have done well. I do a little bit of speaking in conferences, but honestly, not more than two or three per year because that's not my core business. And then I build products for my community. So I only sell online. I have a recipe club, which is a subscription that people can subscribe to. And I send them glucose-friendly recipes every month.

• 43:21Speaker 01

  I have a supplement I formulated a couple of years ago with the best molecules on the market to reduce glucose spikes with natural ingredients if you want to. So that's been a very, very loved product. And I'm launching actually a couple more things um this year, which I'm very excited about. But when I make a product, it's really because I wanna solve a problem and I'm frustrated with the fact that it doesn't exist. Like I don't have ambitions to, you know, have a hundred SKU business or to make more supplements just to make supplements. It's more because I see a problem and I'm trying to fix it. So the problem that I'm gonna fix soon is the fact that I wanna have protein every morning, but very often I only have time to have coffee.

• 44:06Speaker 01

  Yet it's impossible to find a protein powder that's actually delicious to put into your coffee. They're all full of flavorings and textures and all that crap. So I decided to create my own that actually reached the brief of ultra pure, ultra good for you, no additives, nothing rude. So that's launching in a couple of weeks. Um it's called Protein Prodigy.

• 44:25Hala Taha?

  I love that. I will definitely be a customer. I will definitely. I love putting like vitamins and stuff in my coffee.

• 44:31Speaker 01

  You froth it in your coffee and it tastes like you added just like a splash of milk, but you added twenty grams of fucking protein, which is as much as in three eggs in your morning coffee. So this is the kind of stuff I love.

• 44:43Hala Taha?

  Oh, I will definitely be a customer of that. I love that. You just said that like you like to solve problems that you see, like this is, this is something that I wish that existed. Are you actually also listening to your audience in terms of like what they want from you?

• 44:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, all the time, one hundred percent. Um so how do we do that? Well, I have a dedicated team member who reads all the DMs every single day that are received. So that's like thousands of DMs per day and tells me what's going on. Um she reads comments. We get emails from our community all the time. I meet people in the street. They tell me things. I do a lot of Q and A's on Instagram. I see a lot of questions. So I'm very connected to what people need, uh what people want. I can't solve everything, but when I see a problem that um. I find exciting, then I'll go after it. So the morning protein thing was a big recurring theme. Yes, I know I should have a savory breakfast, but I don't have time to cook. I just grab my coffee and then go to work.

• 45:42Speaker 01

  And for years I was like, how do I, mm, gotta put two and two to figure it out. So that's how we do it. Yeah.

• 45:48Hala Taha?

  I love that. And your latest book is about pregnancy. And when I was first like thinking about what do I want to talk about with Jesse on this interview? I was thinking, okay, no one is going to care about pregnancy with my audience. But then when I was actually looking into your stuff, it was just so interesting. And I do feel like a lot of my listeners are thinking about having kids or already had some kids or probably want kids in the future. So I just think it's great information. One of the most powerful things that I heard you say is you you've debunked this myth of a bun in the oven. Everybody always says, oh, when I'm having a baby, I got a bun in the oven. But you say that's totally the wrong way to think about it. So so why do we have to think about it differently?

• 46:30Speaker 01

  Because women are not ovens. So we're not this passive vessel of heat and oxygen, just waiting for a baby to grow. The science is actually pretty clear. So the moment you have sex and make a baby, yes, your baby's DNA is set and is never going to change. But actually, what you do during these nine months of pregnancy, how you eat, your lifestyle, your environment, it's co-creating your baby's epigenetics. So you're not just an oven, you're like an active participant in your baby's creation. So all this came about just because I was pregnant last year and I had my little boy. And as that was going on, I just dug into the research because I'm a biochemist and that's what I do. And I discovered such incredibly fascinating pieces of information

• 47:15Speaker 01

  that are very different to the bun in the oven myth that I had to, I just had to deep dive and write a whole book about it, about how to eat during pregnancy to set up your baby's health for life.

• 47:26Hala Taha?

  Yeah, and when you say epigenetics, just because this is not like a medical audience, right? What does that mean?

• 47:32Speaker 01

  So epigenetics are kind of like these tiny little like switches that sit on your DNA. So for example, you and I have the same gene or genes for diabetes, for example, but maybe on my DNA, there's these little switches that have that gene more activated. And on your DNA, your little switches have that gene gene a bit more silenced. And so DNA is not the whole story. Identical twins have the same DNA, but if they have a different epigenetic makeup, their health is going to be different. So we we used to think that it was all about DNA. Now we know that like our environment or nutrition actively calibrates what's really going on in our body and our health. And so when I say epigenetics, it's just that. It's this programming of the switches on your baby's DNA.

• 48:16Speaker 01

  And these happen during pregnancy. And one of the factors is what you eat. So depending on what you eat, these little switches will program your baby's DNA differently. So there's a lot of stuff going on. You're not just this passive oven.

• 48:29Hala Taha?

  So help us understand, like, tell us about like the difference in the output of your baby. Let's go, let's go business terms. Output of your baby for nine months, if you are eating eggs and, you know, tell us what somebody, what what good looks like in terms of what you should eat in your pregnancy versus somebody who follows the advice of like, nature will handle it. Just eat whatever you want, eat for two and and everything will be fine.

• 48:54Speaker 01

  Well, so one thing to know is that even if you don't follow any of these recommendations, your baby will probably be fine. Like, that is one of the beautiful things about humans is that we're very resilient. But let me take a very simple example, sugar. So when you're pregnant, your baby doesn't actually need you to eat sugar, right? Yet we have these cravings for like ice cream and chocolate, et cetera. So many moms end up eating way more sugar when they're pregnant than when they're not pregnant. The thing is, we know from this incredible study from the UK that looked at people who were in the wombs of their mothers between 1940 and 1953, and who were in the womb of mothers just before and just after. And the reason this is key is because from 1940 to 1953

• 49:38Speaker 01

  in the UK, there was a rationing because of the war. And pregnant moms only had access to a certain amount of sugar. And that was the same for the rest of the population. Anyway, scientists sixty years later, they look at these babies who were developing while moms had less access to sugar. And they saw that in these babies' entire lifetime, they all had a fifteen percent lower risk of having developed diabetes. The only difference was that their moms were eating about forty grams of sugar versus the average before and after, which was eighty grams. So the amount of sugar you eat when you're pregnant seems to calibrate your baby's vulnerability to things like type two diabetes and obesity. And so why is that? First of all, we have to understand that when we're pregnant, our bloodstream and our

• 50:23Speaker 01

  baby's bloodstream is pretty much connected. Not technically connected and touching, but pretty much. There's no filter. So everything you eat goes into your blood and goes into your baby's blood. So if you eat a lot of sugar, your baby in your room is also gonna be receiving a lot of sugar. And this has an impact on the formation of his organs. His body's gonna be like, oh my god, there's a lot of sugar around. We're gonna be born into her world with a lot of sugar. So this might increase his insulin. This might increase his fat mass even in the womb. You're sending signals, and this can calibrate future health. A more positive and exciting example might be choline, which is found in eggs, or omega threes, which are found in fish.

• 51:05Speaker 01

  And today, the sad thing is that most moms are not meeting the general world recommendations of how much choline and omega threes to eat during pregnancy. And we know from some clinical trials that, for example, if you eat a lot of omega threes during pregnancy, a lot of eggs, or if you supplement with them, scientists can measure a four-point increase in your baby's IQ years after birth. For the case of choline, scientists can measure faster reaction time in children who were developing in the wombs of moms that had more choline. So you can do these really positive things for your baby's brain development with simple advice. And so in my book, I recap the four pillars. The first one is to try to reduce how much added sugar you're eating.

• 51:47Speaker 01

  So try to use the WHO recommendation of twenty-five grams of sugar per day or less.

• 51:54Speaker 01

  Second, have a bunch of choline. So I was eating three or four eggs a day during pregnancy to give my baby enough. You can eat other fruits too that contain choline. Omega threes. Three servings of fatty fish per week and your baby's getting all of the omega threes that he needs. And then finally, protein. I know it's a big buzz thing right now, but actually when you're pregnant, you need more protein. And if your baby is protein restricted, this can also create some vulnerabilities later in life. So not too much sugar, choline, protein, omega threes. If you do those four things, which most pregnant moms today are not told about and therefore don't do, you're going to give your baby an upper hand in terms of his long-term health.

• 52:34Hala Taha?

  Protein is a really interesting one. People are really obsessed with protein. Nobody really talks about it in the context of pregnancy. But I heard some fascinating things from you in terms of like, if you know, you don't have enough protein, your, your baby's actually born with, with like less capability to keep muscle later on, even as an adult. So talk to us about how, what you eat, how like, um, you know, the baby is expecting that the environment that they're being born into directly correlates with what the mother's eating.

• 53:02Speaker 01

  Yes, so this is based on studies that we have on animals. So we don't have a, a specific trial where we can take, you know, 5,000 pregnant moms, give half of them enough protein and half of them very little protein and then measure the outcomes, right? That would be unethical. So we use a lot of studies from animals to see this. And in animal studies, when you restrict how much protein a mother has during gestation, it is always extremely clear the baby is born smaller with less muscle mass and the baby stays smaller also later in life. So to give you an example,

• 53:35Speaker 01

  back to this epigenetic thing. So scientists have found that in animals, when a baby is developing in the womb of a mom with very low protein intake, he has little epigenetic switches on his DNA that say, keep your muscle mass small.

• 53:51Speaker 01

  And the fascinating thing is that this epigenetic switch is not just happening during pregnancy. You can measure that when that baby grows up and is an adult. That setting stays with him for life. And if you think about it biologically, okay, imagine your baby is in your room. And he can't see the outside world. He can't touch it. He can't hear. He can't see anything. He's relying on signals that you bring as the mother to sort of infer what world he's going to be born into. And so if you're giving him very little protein, he receives that signal and he thinks, or his body thinks, I'm going to be born into a world with low protein available. And so what's a very smart setting in that case? The setting should be, keep your muscles small.

• 54:35Speaker 01

  Don't try to build a lot of muscle mass. Prioritize your essential organs. Okay, because when protein is scarce, we don't want to have a bunch of muscle mass to deal with. Just focus on the brain and the heart and muscles stay small. And so these little settings can stay with somebody for life. Now, I don't know about you, but if I think about my friends, you know, I have two very close male friends and they kind of have the same gym routine. They eat the same. One is able to build muscle very easily and the other one is not, even though they kind of do the same thing.

• 55:05Hala Taha?

  Mm hmm.

• 55:05Speaker 01

  So I'm not saying that it's because necessarily one of them had a low protein diet during pregnancy, but this could be one of the factors.

• 55:12Hala Taha?

  It's so crazy to think about the fact that whatever you eat during pregnancy, your kid actually like forever is like predisposed to either diabetes or predisposed to not being able to put on muscle mass. So does this mean that we're just like doomed? And we should all be like, Mom, what'd you eat while I was pregnant? Give me the download so I know what's going to happen.

• 55:32Speaker 01

  No, because this is just one of many factors. But the reason I wrote this book is because I feel like it's a factor that's just not spoken about enough. But of course, for example, when my mom was pregnant with me, all she ate was sugar, pretty much. And so when I was 25 years old, I was on the cusp of pre-diabetes, even though I had a quite healthy French diet. And so looking back, now that I know what I know, I'm wondering, oh, maybe it has something to do with the diet I was exposed to in the room. I had a vulnerability. This is all vulnerability. That we're talking about. It's not a, it's not a sentence. It's not because your mom ate a lot of sugar that you're for sure gonna get diabetes. You can always, you know, change things in your life. You can always counteract this with lifestyle, but

• 56:13Speaker 01

  it's about vulnerabilities and resilience. And I think if we know this, why not use these nine months to try to give our baby the least possible amount of vulnerability to disease and the most resilience? And the main, the main problem, honesty, is that today, this stuff is not discussed. Even though in the OMS, the European Union, they all, the US NIH, they all have these recommendations for choline, for omega threes, for sugar, but they're just not communicated and not followed. So it's, there's a real failure of communication here. That's all it is.

• 56:45Hala Taha?

  Now, I, I met a lady, who was like a complete stranger, we were just having like a random conversation with her. I forgot even who she was. It was somebody, somebody in like service or something. And she was talking to me about how she had kids and uh, she thought I was a lot younger than I really am. And she's like, oh, and you, when you, I, I don't have kids yet, but she was like, when you're older and you start having kids, she's like, my kid gave me forty pounds, is what she told me. My kid gave me forty pounds. And in my head, I was like, I think it's a choice whether or not you gain, you know, forty, fifty pounds in your pregnancy. And I think there's a lot of misguidance in terms of like, eat whatever you want when you're pregnant. And a lot of people kind of, uh, you know, it's hard to get pregnant, I'm sure, but I also think

• 57:27Hala Taha?

  you have some control and I think there's some misguidance around like how much you should or shouldn't eat. So what's, what's your thoughts around that?

• 57:34Speaker 01

  I think it's a pretty complex subject. I, I agree with you in the sense that there's a lot of misguided advice, like, oh, you're pregnant, you're gonna be fat, getting, get fat anyway, so eat as much as you want, or you need to eat for two, or people sort of encouraging you to eat a lot. The truth is, you don't actually need to eat that much more when you're pregnant. And this comes as a bit of a shock. But if you look at the science, it's like three hundred calories per day at the very end of pregnancy and way less before. But, first of all, pregnancy can come with nausea, with food aversions, with cravings for sugar, hormones go haywire. So it's, it is hard to Have the same diet as you used to. And then you throw in that big soup, like all the advice around you.

• 58:17Speaker 01

  And for some women, that ends up with, you know, gaining forty, fifty pounds. But you don't, you don't have to, you don't have to. So I think if you're able to sort of follow these principles and understand a little bit the science behind it all, it's easier to not put on a lot of excess weight. But for some women, that's just how their body works. They can eat super healthy, but just the hormones and the pregnancy itself just makes them gain a lot of weight. But I agree with you. There needs to be more education that you don't actually need to eat for two. You need to eat for like one point two. So it's not that much more.

• 58:50Hala Taha?

  You weren't saying like, take a, a certain vitamin, prenatal vitamins. I'm sure you, you think that's okay. But you were saying to actually like eat fish to get, to get the omega three. Like, what are your thoughts around vitamins versus just eating the proper food?

• 59:04Speaker 01

  So it's actually pretty freaking hard to hit, you know, every single one of your goals every day, especially for omega threes and choline and protein. So I actually was taking a prenatal, a pretty complete one, but with methylated uh, forms of uh, of molecules, which is a better way to absorb them. I was also taking an omega three supplement in addition to eating fish. Um, but food should always be there first. You know, supplements are an insurance policy and, but you can't just take supplements and then just eat pizza and think you're, you're gonna give your baby everything he needs. That's not how it works. But I think as a compliment, they're great. There's no reason to oppose them, you know? I think both can totally work. And in the book, I, I give some guidance around what to look for in the prenatals,

• 59:48Speaker 01

  uh, what kind of, what molecules you need in there, what form, et cetera, right? What quantities? Because there's so many prenatal supplements on the market and many of them don't contain the most important stuff.

• 1:00:01Hala Taha?

  Something else I want to talk about is something that's often not discussed ever, which is miscarriages, right? Miscarriages are something that happen to a lot of people. Often people don't even, you know, tell their closest friends that they've, that they've had a miscarriage. And I know that actually happened to you. So would you feel comfortable to tell us a story about your miscarriage? And maybe what you've learned from that experience that you want to teach other people?

• 1:00:27Speaker 01

  One hundred percent. I'm very happy to talk about it. Thank you for asking. Because when I went through it, I felt so alone and I felt like I had nobody around me who had stories to share. So I'm very happy to share, even if it can help one person feel less alone. So I got pregnant the first time and everything was fine, but at the three month scan, so I've had, I had scans before, we saw the heartbeat, everything was fine. At the three month scan, the doctor told me, oh, the embryo has stopped developing. There's no heartbeat, the pregnancy is over. But the crazy part is, I didn't not have any symptoms. I hadn't bled, I hadn't had any cramps, like I had zero symptoms. So this was something I learned as a shock

• 1:01:09Speaker 01

  at the doctor's office. And this is called a silent miscarriage, meaning the pregnancy stops, but your body doesn't expel the tissue. So I had to have a DNC and it was extremely traumatic. I felt so alone. I felt so depressed, so angry. I had to rewire my entire brain in terms of my expectations for the following year. I felt like it was just so unfair. Why is this happening to me? And the, the intensity of the emotion was not something I was expecting uh, or prepared for. And I remember telling my husband that if emotions could kill, I feel like I would be dead. That is the level of emotional turmoil that I was experiencing.

• 1:01:54Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:55Speaker 01

  And I learned, you know, I was thinking, oh, this is something I did. Is it because I did this, it did that? And then learned that actually miscarriages are very common, one in five pregnancies today. And that it's usually not at all the mom's fault. It's just a chromosomal abnormality. Um, but it, you asked me, what did I learn from this experience? I learned that it's something we need to talk about more because the people around me didn't really know how to how to hold that grief. It's not a grief that people are very comfortable around. Um, and I think because of that taboo, it's just being perpetuated. But then when I started talking about it, I learned that my mom had had miscarriages, my stepmom, my grandmothers,

• 1:02:37Speaker 01

  my friends, but nobody had ever told me this before. And so I think the main problem is that we need to talk about it more so that we know it's common. And so we feel supported and not alone when it does happen. And a little word of encouragement, after that miscarriage, I got pregnant again a few months afterwards. And then my baby boy was born and is perfectly healthy, but it was a real trial of the heart. Then go through pregnancy again with that level of anxiety because I was convinced I was gonna miscarriage again. But I didn't, and now as well. But man, that was just hard freaking core. Wow.

• 1:03:16Hala Taha?

  Yeah, and I'm sure that made you wanna research, like, what can I do differently this time? Is that when you started thinking about this book and kind of researching for this book while you were actually pregnant again?

• 1:03:28Speaker 01

  So I started researching during the first pregnancy. And what I learned is that there wasn't really anything different that I could do because most miscarriages are not about something that you do or something you eat. They're really out of your control. It's like the egg or the sperm had a slight chromosomal abnormality. And so it stopped developing because it didn't have the right DNA. And this has nothing to do with what you do during a pregnancy. That's one of the cases where you actually often don't have an agency. This happens earlier on in the DNA process. When the egg is being formed, when the sperm is being formed, yeah.

• 1:04:04Hala Taha?

  That makes a lot of sense. And I'm sure that takes a lot of weight off of people's shoulders, like, especially women who are the ones that are pregnant. Like, it's not your fault.

• 1:04:11Speaker 01

  No, it's not your fault.

• 1:04:14Hala Taha?

  Nature, but that could be insensitive to say to somebody who just had a miscarriage. So what should somebody say?

• 1:04:22Speaker 01

  This is a great question. And people were like, girl, it's just nature doing its thing. Don't worry, you'll get pregnant again. That's pretty much the worst thing you can say. The thing I liked people to tell me was, I'm so sorry. This must be so incredibly hard. Can I do anything? Can I bring you food? Can I take you out for lunch? Do you wanna go get a massage? Do you wanna go for a walk? Just like how you would support somebody going through grief. You know, there's so many different shades of grief, so. Not trying to fix it, not trying to minimize it. Because even though the baby, you know, was not visible and the pregnancy was not yet visible, for me, it was very real. And so I was truly grieving something very real. And so that's, that's my advice.

• 1:05:07Speaker 01

  Just, just treat it like you would treat normal grief and be there and don't minimize it.

• 1:05:10Hala Taha?

  I love that. So the pregnancy book, did that feel like it was a disconnect from your glucose brand? Or like, did, would, do you ever feel like that puts you in a box at all? And like that you wanna like grow out of that, that glucose goddess and be more like general? Or how do you, how do you think about that?

• 1:05:28Speaker 01

  I think my real talent is to make complicated science easy to understand. And I don't think it stops at grew gross. My, honestly, one of my biggest passions in life is mental health. Because I went through so much of it myself. And I have this dream one day that I'm gonna do a book about mental health. And kind of find some, you know, science-backed hacks to help people. And this doesn't feel weird to me, doesn't feel like a departure. Because in my core, what I love to do is explain science. And so it might be glucose, it might be skin health, it might be mental health, it might be um, heart health, it might be exercise, it can be anything. And you know, over the past two years, I've actually been doing content that's not just about glucose.

• 1:06:11Speaker 01

  So I'll do stuff on like fasting, or I'll do stuff on exercise performance. And I just love all of it. And my audience appreciates it too. And honestly, like I've talked about glucose so much. And there aren't that many new studies coming out to feed new content, enough new content. So I, I've had to branch out and I've loved doing it. And my audience also loves it, so it's good.

• 1:06:34Hala Taha?

  Yeah, and I feel like that's a normal trajectory of creator entrepreneurs, right? You start out with a niche, you get really popular for it. You're like the, you know, queen of glucose. You are the top thought leader of that. And now you have this captive audience that you can kind of continue to, to teach on things that are not just glucose. So I, I think that's, that's awesome.

• 1:06:55Speaker 01

  And another thing is that, you know, the only reason I wrote this pregnancy book is because I was going through Pregnancy. And so as I go through my life, new topics are going to interest me as I age and get wiser. And so I think, you know, my audience is going to go on that journey with me. So when I go through menopause, I'm sure I'm going to do a lot of menopause content. When my kid is five years old and only wants to eat pasta, I'm gonna have to figure out how to fix that and I'm gonna talk about that. So it's also a journey and I, I don't see this brand and this project as something that I'm going to, you know, exit in two years. Like for me, this is, this is a lifelong marriage and opportunity and joy. So it's not gonna stop anytime soon.

• 1:07:35Hala Taha?

  Okay, so for the wannabe entrepreneurs that are listening, that are, that are working in a corporate job, like you said, you worked at Twenty Three and Me, I started Yap while I was working at Disney, right? Um, what is your advice to them in terms of like, they've got something that they're passionate about that seems pretty random, right? But they wanna start posting about it. What's your advice to them?

• 1:07:55Speaker 01

  Well, I did two things that helped me actually do it. So I'm gonna share that and if it resonates, it does. If it doesn't, doesn't. First of all, I started a little diary. So every week or every month, I would write, you know, April twenty nineteen, I'm thinking about this glucose thing, like, um, could, could this be an idea? You know, May twenty nineteen, oh, I got a glucose monitor, this was happened. And, and to just write a little bit of a diary, just once a month, a few sentences, because I found that one of the hardest things for me at the beginning was that I felt so discouraged constantly. I was like, I only have a thousand followers, I only got twenty likes, like, I'm going nowhere, this is, this is useless. But actually, that's your brain playing tricks on you. And so I would go back to the diary from six months ago and realize,

• 1:08:40Speaker 01

  oh, six months ago, I didn't even have an Instagram account, like, realize how far you've come, girl. And that's, that was very motivating to me. And then second thing, I made a contract with myself. I was at Twenty Three and Me, I said, I'm gonna work on this glucose project for one hour a day for six months after work. That's my contract and I will only assess the success or whether I wanna continue or not at the end of these six months. Because every day during those six months, I had a hundred reasons to stop doing the glucose project. Doesn't make money, I have a full-time job, where it is going, it's not a business, whatever. And that contract saved me because I just put my head down. I was like, one hour a day for six months, one hour a day for six months.

• 1:09:24Speaker 01

  And thank God, thank God I had that because at the end of the six months, I actually had something and then I made the decision to go for it. So you have to hack yourself into not giving up every single day. Those are the two main hacks that saved me.

• 1:09:37Hala Taha?

  So good. That's such, such great advice. Last question on entrepreneurship. So 1,000 followers to now 6 million followers. You mentioned a big milestone. First milestone was the book. But like, help us understand, like, what were some of the big things, like big swings that you're like, oh, my gosh, I have a million followers all of a sudden. And like, how did it really take off? What were some of the big things?

• 1:09:58Speaker 01

  So for the first two years, it was extremely slow, but I was posting every day. And I understood something key. That if I wanted to grow my Instagram account, the only way to get people to find my account and follow me was if their friends or their family members shared with them one piece of my content. Like, this is how people consume content. You get memes and reels in your DMs from your friends and your mom and stuff. And that's how you follow your account. So I thought to myself, my KPI is, is this shareable? Is Nancy on the toilet peeing, looking at Instagram, gonna see my graph and decide to share it with her friend? That's the only thing that matters.

• 1:10:41Speaker 01

  And so as I was thinking about these glucose graphs, these posts, that was my North Star. Is this shareable? Does somebody understand it in less than three seconds? And does it make them feel good, useful, smart to share that with their friends? And so I just optimized around that. And I stripped down all the complexities of the graph. There are almost no words on there. It's very simple, surprising tests of foods that people have heard about that bust common myths, you know? And that's how I grew. But it was a very, very long process, for sure. I was even reaching out at some point. I was like sending LinkedIn messages and DMs to everybody I knew who had more than 5,000 followers. Saying like, hey, can I test something on my glucose monitor for you?

• 1:11:26Speaker 01

  And they were like, yeah, sure, test this. And so I did. And then I sent them the test and I was like, I hope they're gonna share this in their stories with their followers. And sometimes it worked. It was just, it's grueling. But I knew, I knew that the North Star was, was shareability. And then the engine kind of built itself and then I kind of got it. And then, once it becomes viral and people share it, then the growth is something you don't even control anymore. At least that was my experience.

• 1:11:51Hala Taha?

  I love that. Thank you so much for sharing your story. I'm not sure how often people actually ask you about that side of it. So I'm glad that you got to share it.

• 1:11:59Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:12:00Hala Taha?

  Cool. So I end my show with two questions I ask all of my guests. The first one is, what is one actionable thing our young improfitters can do today to become more profitable tomorrow?

• 1:12:10Speaker 01

  I'm gonna have to answer about health because health is wealth, baby. Like there is, you can have all the money in the world if you don't have your health. It's complicated. So how to make sure you have more profitability in your health? Start today. Have a savory breakfast built around protein, no sugar in the morning. Thank me later.

• 1:12:29Hala Taha?

  Very solid advice. And what is your secret to profiting in life? This can go beyond financial.

• 1:12:36Speaker 01

  Turning my phone off because I feel like to really enjoy my life, the more time I spend on my phone, on my computer and social media, even though it's my work, the less I feel like I enjoy my life. So it's kind of a double edged sword. I try to turn off my phone as much as possible, at least on the weekends or on vacation. And that's when I really will feel happy, like truly deep happiness to me really comes when I unplug. And it's kind of a boring answer, but it feels so true and I feel that in my core, in my body. What about you? I'm curious.

• 1:13:07Hala Taha?

  My secret to, I would say relationships, like just something that I forgot. I think, I can't remember, I talked to so many people, so I can't remember who told me this, but they said like, if you had to choose how to spend your time and money, you should always invest in relationships. Like you'll never regret that you spent your time and money on your relationships. So like, that's really to me like, anytime I have to make any sort of decision, I'm like, does this optimize relationships or not? And if it doesn't, then yeah, then I go in the other direction.

• 1:13:36Speaker 01

  So, so important.

• 1:13:38Hala Taha?

  Well, Jesse, where can everybody learn more about you and everything that you do?

• 1:13:42Speaker 01

  A good place is Instagram, Glucose Goddess. So my books that I recommend are Glucose Revolution, to learn everything about glucose and for pregnancy, it's called Nine Months to Count Forever. And if you're excited about the protein, which you should be, it's called Protein Prodigy. And you can preorder it now already.

• 1:13:59Hala Taha?

  Awesome. I can't wait to learn more about that. I'll stick all those links in the show notes. Jesse, thank you so much for joining us on Young and Profiting Podcast.

• 1:14:07Speaker 01

  Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure.

• 1:14:10Hala Taha?

  All right, gang. I personally learned a lot from this conversation with Jessie. The biggest lesson for me is that what we eat is not just about calories or weight. It's about the signals we are sending to our bodies every single day. Jessie helped us understand how glucose can affect our bodies, even if we don't have diabetes. And what I love about Jessie's approach is that it's not about being perfect and cutting out everything you enjoy eating in every sweet. It's about being more strategic, having these sweet foods after a meal instead of on an empty stomach, choosing whole fruits over fruit juices, building your first meal around protein, and when you can, moving your body after eating. One of the most practical takeaways was the savory breakfast. Jessie explained that your first meal of the day can either put you on the glucose roller coaster or help you get off of it.

• 1:14:55Hala Taha?

  So if you're constantly hitting that afternoon wall, craving sugar, or feeling foggy, your breakfast might be the first place to look. If this conversation resonated with you and you want to go deeper on the science of glucose and how to avoid glucose spikes, definitely check out Jessie's book, The Glucose Goddess Method. And if you're pregnant or soon to be pregnant, she's got this book, Nine Months That Count Forever, and it goes super deep on the science of pregnancy nutrition and how the choices we make during those nine months can shape lifelong health. If you're pregnant, I highly recommend you check out that book. Thanks for listening to this episode of Young and Profiting Podcast. If this conversation helped you, share it with somebody who needs more energy or more focus or a simpler way to think about their health.

• 1:15:38Hala Taha?

  And make sure you follow the show so you never miss an episode. You can also find me on Instagram at YapWithHala or connect with me on LinkedIn by searching Hala Taha. This is your host, Hala Taha, AKA The Podcast Princess, signing off.