As someone who hopes to be a lifelong learner, I enjoy keeping nonfiction on regular rotation in my reading life.

My big picture focus is almost always on living a good life. As a result my nonfiction book choices often relate in that they contain lessons to improve or better my life.

My areas of interest usually have to do with self help or personal development. Whether that’s positive psychology books, parenting guides, or deep dives into nutrition.

In my current reading life, I find it works to focus on one nonfiction book a month.

I try to take a slow and steady approach reading a chapter a day to really absorb the information. Often times that means it takes me 10 days to 2 weeks to finish the book. Sometimes longer.

Nonfiction Reading and Reviews in 2024

Over the years, I’ve experimented in different ways with my nonfiction reading.

Last year I shared my highlights, thoughts, reactions, and questions in an online book club, Pearls of Wisdom, over on Fable. This is still open to the public if you’re interested in any of our 2023 reads.

This year I’m going back to my nonfiction spotlight approach. It’s similar to the way I explored and shared my thoughts back in 2021 for my year of health experiment.

While I enjoy my fable book clubs and buddy reads (my romance book club, A Dose of Romance, is still going strong), I missed the process of sharing an in-depth review of my nonfiction read on the blog.

Writing out my thoughts, feelings, and takeaways from the book helps me work through them. It also solidifies them in my mind to take forward with me.

I find I’m more comfortable being a little bit more vulnerable in this space. That vulnerability is where those nuggets of wisdom from the reading life can move forward into actual life.

February’s Nonfiction Reads: Glucose Goddess Jessie Inchauspé’s Work

In February, I took a deep dive into biochemist Jessie Inchauspé’s work. Known as the Glucose Goddess, she has written two books about how to flatten your glucose levels thereby improving your health.

I first heard about Jessie Inchauspé after Ashley at A Seed for the Soul mentioned her interview with Marie Forleo as inspiration in an Everyday Beautiful feature.

I’m alway eager to learn more about nutrition and how we can improve our health through food. I watched the interview and immediately put a hold on The Glucose Goddess Method: The 4-Week Guide to Cutting Cravings, Getting Your Energy Back, and Feeling Amazing.

From there I knew I wanted to learn even more hacks as well as the science behind them with her first book Glucose Revolution: The Life-Changing Power of Balancing Your Blood Sugar.

Jessie Inchauspé’s Glucose Books

Glucose Revolution: The Life-Changing Power of Balancing Your Blood Sugar

Book Blurb:

“Improve all areas of your health—your sleep, cravings, mood, energy, skin, weight—and even slow down aging with easy, science-based hacks to manage your blood sugar while still eating the foods you love.

Glucose, or blood sugar, is a tiny molecule in our body that has a huge impact on our health. It enters our bloodstream through the starchy or sweet foods we eat. Ninety percent of us suffer from too much glucose in our system—and most of us don’t know it.

The symptoms? Cravings, fatigue, infertility, hormonal issues, acne, wrinkles… And over time, the development of conditions like type 2 diabetes, polycystic ovarian syndrome, cancer, dementia, and heart disease.

Drawing on cutting-edge science and her own pioneering research, biochemist Jessie Inchauspé offers ten simple, surprising hacks to help you balance your glucose levels and reverse your symptoms—without going on a diet or giving up the foods you love. For example:
– How eating foods in the right order will make you lose weight effortlessly
– What secret ingredient will allow you to eat dessert and still go into fat-burning mode
– What small change to your breakfast will unlock energy and cut your cravings

Both entertaining, informative, and packed with the latest scientific data, this book presents a new way to think about better health. Glucose Revolution is chock-full of tips that can drastically and immediately improve your life, whatever your dietary preferences.”

The Glucose Goddess Method: The 4-Week Guide to Cutting Cravings, Getting Your Energy Back, and Feeling Amazing

Book Blurb:

“From the #1 internationally bestselling author of Glucose Revolution , a four-week, four-step program for living a healthier, happier life with balanced blood sugar including over 100 recipes, an interactive workbook, and the guidance to make the “new science of nutrition…practical for everyone” (Robert H. Lustig, MD, MSL, New York Times bestselling author of Fat Chance ).

Do you suffer from cravings, chronic fatigue, or sugar addiction? Do you sometimes wake up in the morning feeling unable to face the day? Most of the population is stuck on a glucose roller coaster.

In her first book, the instant #1 internationally bestselling Glucose Revolution , Jessie Inchauspé offered a revolutionary framework for healing through science-backed nutrition hacks. Now, in The Glucose Goddess Method , she shares the “best practical guide for managing glucose to maximize health and longevity” (David Sinclair, PhD, New York Times bestselling author of Lifespan ) with this four-week program to incorporating the principles of how to avoid glucose spikes into your everyday life.

Complete with 100 recipes and an interactive workbook, you are guided through four simple, science-proven ways to steady your blood sugar, gaining boundless energy, curbing your cravings, clearing your skin, slowing your ageing process, and sleeping better than you ever have before. You will create positive new habits for life. The best part? You won’t be counting calories and can still eat all the foods you love.”

Review of Jessie Inchauspé’s Glucose Books

The Glucose Goddess Method

I gave The Glucose Goddess Method 4 stars.

Originally I started this book on audio since that was the hold that came through first. I wound up hybrid reading switching between the ebook and the audiobook. Jessie Inchauspé narrates these books herself and did a wonderful job.

The recipes in The Glucose Goddess Method were so fun and simple. While Inchauspé does read the easy recipes aloud, I preferred to read those sections as part of the ebook.

I appreciated this as an intro into her work and findings. The way she highlighted the most impactful hacks for flattening your glucose levels was helpful too.

They are:

• Have a savory breakfast.
• Have one tablespoon of vinegar a day. The most powerful time is before your meal with the most carbs.
• Add a veggie starter to one meal a day.
• After one meal each day, move for at least 10 minutes.

This book is great for anyone looking to ease into lifestyle changes. Though I wasn’t able to access the extras with my library copy, the workbook element sounded great. This would be a wonderful starting point for making small but real changes for those who prefer not to get bogged down or overwhelmed by the science.

Glucose Revolution

After reading The Glucose Goddess Method, I was definitely eager to check out Inchauspé’s first book which contained more hacks and more of the science behind her findings. This book delivered.

Glucose Revolution was a 5-star read.

The first sections of the book explain what glucose is, how it fuels us, and why glucose spikes are bad for our health. Finally, it shares 10 hacks to adopt to flatten your glucose spikes.

Something Inchauspé clearly excels at is taking complex biological processes and explaining them in layman’s terms with interesting anecdotes and fun graphics.

I also appreciated that she made a point to say nutrition isn’t only about glucose.

After reading Deep Nutrition by Dr. Catherine Shanahan years ago, I’ve tried to remove bad fats found in hydrogenated oils from our diet. I was especially curious to hear Inchauspé’s take on different fats after seeing her recommend in The Glucose Goddess Method processed foods (like premade pie dough) to make recipes even easier. Unfortunately vegetable oils are often an ingredient that come with convenience.

First, glucose isn’t everything. Some foods will keep your glucose levels completely steady but aren’t great for your health. For instance, industrial processed oils and trans fats age, inflame, and hurt our organs, but they don’t cause glucose spikes. Alcohol is another example—it doesn’t spike our glucose levels, but that doesn’t mean it’s good for us, either.

Incidentally, there are good and bad fats, and the bad fat that we should avoid is found in hydrogenated and refined cooking oils such as canola, corn, cottonseed, soybean, safflower, sunflower, grapeseed, and rice bran oil.

Most of my takeaways, which I share below, came from this book. I found the science and study examples fascinating.

Some Important Quotes and Statistics

88 percent of Americans are likely to have dysregulated glucose levels (even if they are not overweight according to medical guidelines), and most don’t know it.

Chronic inflammation is the source of most chronic illnesses, such as stroke, chronic respiratory diseases, heart disorders, liver disease, obesity, and diabetes. The World Health Organization calls inflammation-based diseases “the greatest threat to human health.” Worldwide, three out of five people will die of an inflammation-based disease.

In 2019, the American Diabetes Association (the ADA) started endorsing glucose-flattening diets in the light of compelling evidence that following these improves type 2 diabetes outcomes. Now we know that to reverse type 2 diabetes and insulin resistance, we need to flatten our glucose curves.

Glucose is the key to many of these processes, and it shows in the data—people with fasting levels higher than 100 mg/dL, what is classified as prediabetes, have over double the likelihood of dying of cancer. Flattening glucose and insulin curves is thus an important step to helping prevent the development of cancer.

What the ADA describes as “normal” may not actually be optimal. Early studies showed that the thriving range for fasting glucose may be between 72 and 85 mg/dL. That’s because there is more likelihood of developing health problems from 85 mg/dL and up.

When 60 million Americans eat a cereal such as Honey Nut Cheerios for breakfast every day, 60 million Americans are pushing their glucose, fructose, and insulin levels into damaging ranges every morning. Sixty million Americans are generating swarms of free radicals in their bodies, taxing their pancreas, inflaming their cells, increasing their fat storage, and setting themselves up for a day full of cravings from shortly after they get out of bed.

The 10 Hacks from Glucose Revolution

1. Eat foods in the right order.
2. Add a green starter to all your meals.
3. Stop counting calories.
4. Flatten your breakfast curve (eat a savory breakfast).
5. Have any type of sugar you like – they’re all the same.
6. Pick dessert over a sweet snack.
7. Reach for vinegar before you eat.
8. After you eat, move.
9. If you have to snack, go savory.
10. Put some clothes on your carbs.

Pearls of Wisdom Takeaways from Glucose Goddess Jessie Inchauspé

1. So many of the disorders and illnesses linked to high glucose levels improve or can even be reversed by flattening your glucose curves. This includes type 2 diabetes and the cognitive decline that is beginning to be referred to as type 3 diabetes.
2. This statistic below. I also used her formula for judging LDL pattern B size to do the math on my most recent lipid panels.

Nine out of ten doctors still measure total LDL cholesterol to diagnose heart disease and prescribe statins if it’s too high. But what’s important is LDL pattern B and inflammation. To add to the problem, statins lower LDL pattern A, but they don’t lower the problematic pattern B. This is why statins don’t decrease the risk of a first heart attack.

3. Her toast analogy – we’re cooking or glycating from the time we are born. This is normal and how we age but the food we eat can speed it up. For instance:

Fructose molecules glycate things 10 times as fast as glucose, generating that much more damage.

4. Eat fiber (vegetables) first, then fat and protein, and finally starches and sugars. Fiber’s superpowers slow glucose absorption which lessens the glucose spike.
5. It’s better to have something sweet at the end of meal rather than on its own as a snack. When we tack it on at the end of the meal, we’re eating sugars last and that lessens the glucose spike.
6. It’s best to eat fruit whole. However we’re big smoothies lovers in our house. That’s how I’ve reined in my sweet tooth. I liked the following rule of hers and keep that in mind along with consuming the smoothie at the end of dinner as a dessert.

A good rule of thumb for a smoothie: don’t put more fruit into the blender than you could eat whole in one sitting.

7. The hack, have any type of sugar you want, was fascinating. As someone who had gestational diabetes, I was also infuriated to learn about what lower glycemic index really means when it comes to sugar. That “lower number” is meaningless when you realize there’s actually more damage happening inside your body thanks to the fructose spike. This quote sums it up:

For instance, agave syrup is often recommended to diabetics and women diagnosed with gestational diabetes because it has a “lower glycemic index” than table sugar. This is true—it does spike our glucose levels less. But the reason for this is that it contains more fructose and less glucose than regular table sugar. (Agave is about 80 percent fructose, compared to table sugar, which is 50 percent fructose.) And although this means the glucose spike it causes is smaller, the fructose spike is bigger.

8. The amount of antioxidants in a teaspoon of honey is equal to that found in half a blueberry!
9. How the vinegar hack works was so interesting. I’ve long used apple cider vinegar in a tonic or tea when I feel like I’m starting to get sick but there’s even more power to it without adding honey so I’m excited to try many of these vinegar recipes.
10. When it comes to moving after you eat to lessen the glucose spike, just 10 minutes is helpful for up to 90 minutes after a meal. That’s a big window!

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Were you surprised by any of the statistics from this book? Do you deal with symptoms caused by dysregulated glucose levels? Are any of these hacks something you’d like to implement in your life?