I spent years checking calorie counts on packaged food labels and tracking them in some god forsaken app. Calories were–and, for most people, still are–a measure of how healthy a food or drink was. But in the last year, I learned that most of what we’ve been taught about consuming food is wrong, and the concept of calories (and keeping beneath that government-recommended 2000 calorie mark each day) is a big part of the miseducation. Now, scientists say that the best health metric to gauge is our blood sugar.
“The calorie is not a good description of a food’s nutrient density or how your body will react to it. Two people can eat the same muffin and it will change the body’s system in different ways,” says Professor Tim Spector, an epidemiologist and founder of Zoe, an app and program that helps you understand how food affects your body. “Generally, the more a food manufacturer talks about their ‘low calorie’ food, the worse the quality of that food is, and the more of it we overeat–by up to 15 percent, research shows.” Studies have also shown that calorie counting doesn’t actually work.
If we all understood how our blood sugar works for and against us, we’d all be happier and healthier. Why? “Imbalanced blood sugar is not just responsible for out-of-control cravings, appetite, disregulation and visceral fat gain, but also impaired immunity, low energy, erratic moods, anxiety, gut issues, lack of concentration, inflammation, skin issues like acne, psoriasis and eczema, and more,” explains Rhian Stephenson, nutritionist and founder of Artah.
Additionally, health concerns such as polycystic ovarian syndrome and infertility are also tightly linked with glucose, says Jesse Inschauspe, a biochemist, also known as Glucose Goddess on Instagram, whose account and recipe book, The Glucose Goddess Method, offers a wealth of easy blood sugar management solutions. “Longer term, the more spikes you have, the more likely it is that you’ll develop type 2 diabetes,” she adds. The aim is to have blood sugar rising and falling gently, rather than spiking and dropping dramatically, to keep insulin levels in check.
It might help to give a bit of an explainer about insulin, the regulatory hormone that is secreted by the body in response to the things we ingest. Its role is to dictate whether glucose is used, stored in muscles and the liver, or put into fat cells to save for later. When we take in more glucose than our body can process, it responds by increasing insulin secretion to clear it from the blood more quickly. “The more sugar we have, the higher insulin goes, and instead of a nice rolling curve of blood sugar, you see a drastic spike and subsequent drop,” explains Stephenson. “This can even cause your blood sugar to drop lower than it was before you started eating.”