Jessie Inchauspé Says Your Breakfast Is Why You Feel Terrible by 10 a.m.

Here is the thing nobody tells you about that glass of orange juice you have every morning: it contains roughly the same sugar as a can of Coca-Cola. Jessie Inchauspé, better known as the Glucose Goddess, will tell you this with a warm smile and zero apology, because her entire career is built on delivering news like that in a way that makes you want to fix it rather than despair. On this episode of Young and Profiting, she works through the core argument of her work: glucose spikes are not just a diabetic’s problem, they are everyone’s problem, and the most powerful lever you can pull is the meal you are probably eating wrong right now.

You Are Slowly Cooking

Inchauspé has a gift for the arresting metaphor. Glycation, the cellular aging process accelerated by excess glucose, she describes like this:

Human beings, from the moment we are born, 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.

It is a little grim. It is also the kind of image that sticks. She goes on to connect glycation to collagen breakdown, wrinkles, and organ decline, which is the part of the conversation where host Hala Taha visibly perks up, because aging faster is the one health threat that cuts through any amount of nutritional abstraction. Inchauspé knows her audience. She has spent five years figuring out exactly which door to use to get people to care about their blood sugar.

The practical architecture she builds around this is genuinely useful and not especially punishing. No food is off the table. The hacks are mostly about sequencing: eat vegetables before starches, never eat sugar on an empty stomach, have a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar in water before a sugary meal to blunt the spike by up to 30%, and do some bicep curls in front of the television after dessert. She is not asking you to become a different person. She is asking you to reorganize your plate and maybe lift a water bottle.

The Savory Breakfast Argument

The claim she returns to again and again is that a sweet breakfast is the reason most people feel wrecked by mid-morning. Toast with jam, a fruit smoothie, honey in your tea. All of it sends glucose spiking on an empty stomach, which produces a rapid crash, which produces cravings, which produces the 3 p.m. wall and the 10 p.m. ice cream order that feels inexplicable. She traces the whole arc back to a single decision made before 9 a.m.

It’s 10:00 a.m. and you already feel tired. That’s not because of your sleep, that’s because of your breakfast.

Her fix is protein-forward. Eggs, Greek yogurt, leftovers, tofu. Anything that does not spike glucose. She is not precious about it. When Taha mentions she eats yogurt with granola and fruit around noon, Inchauspé essentially tells her she is fine and to stop worrying, because the yogurt provides enough protein to cushion the fruit. She reserves the strict sequencing advice for people who are eating five cookies for breakfast. Context matters.

The honey-versus-table-sugar section is where a little skepticism is fair. Her point is sound: honey, agave, and maple syrup are the same glucose molecules as white sugar, just marketed at a premium. But the broader frame of her work occasionally risks giving people a false sense of control. A tablespoon of vinegar does not undo a bad diet. A ten-minute walk after cake is not a clinical intervention. She is careful to say this, mostly, but the Instagram format her brand runs on tends to strip out the caveats.

From Glucose Graphs to a Business

The second half of the episode pivots to how she built the Glucose Goddess into a company, and here she is sharper and more interesting than the typical creator-entrepreneur story. She started at 23andMe as a product manager, put on a glucose monitor out of curiosity, and connected her own mental health instability to blood sugar swings. Then she coded a tool to turn monitor screenshots into clean graphs and started posting them on Instagram. After six months she had a thousand followers. She quit anyway.

My KPI is is this shareable? Is Nancy on the toilet peeing, looking at Instagram, going to see my graph, and decide to share it with her friend. That’s the only thing that matters.

That framing, product manager applies growth hacking logic to public health content, is what actually made the account work. No investors. No deck. Books that have now sold 3 million copies in 42 languages. A recipe subscription, a glucose supplement, and a protein powder launching imminently that she describes as dissolving in coffee to taste like a splash of milk while delivering 20 grams of protein. She is a good salesperson. She is also, to her credit, bootstrapped and building products she claims to have actually wanted to exist.

The episode also gets into her pregnancy book and her own miscarriage, and she handles both with more candor than you expect from someone in influencer mode. On the miscarriage, which was a silent one discovered at the three-month scan, she says: ‘If emotions could kill, I feel like I would be dead.’ She talks about what people said that was useless, ‘it’s just nature doing its thing,’ and what actually helped, which was someone showing up and asking if they could bring food or take her for a walk. It is the best two minutes of the episode and has nothing to do with blood sugar.

I made a contract with myself. I’m going to work on this Glucose project for 1 hour a day for 6 months after work. That’s my contract, and I will only assess the success or whether I want to continue or not at the end of these 6 months.

The contract-with-yourself framework is the kind of advice that sounds simple and is actually quite hard to follow. Most people quit the thing during the six months, not after a fair assessment of it. She knew that about herself and built the commitment structure accordingly. That is not a glucose hack. That is just good thinking about how humans behave.