Jessie Inchauspé: With your diet during pregnancy, you're programming your baby's DNA. And this is going to have an impact on your baby's development and on their future risk of disease. And there's a lot of pregnant moms who are eating a diet that's not giving them the nutrients their baby needs. This is not the mom's fault. This is the fault of our food system. This is the fault of society. And nobody's telling moms about this. And I wanted to create this guide to help parents navigate that food system and see easy things they can do to help their baby's development. And I know this because as a biochemist when I became pregnant, I just went deep, deep, deep into the research. And there are some main things that I learned. For example, 90% of moms are not getting enough choline during pregnancy. And choline is super important. It forms your baby's brain in the womb. So this is the amount of eggs that I ate per week during the 9 months of pregnancy because this is the simplest way to give enough choline to our baby. And then your baby needs no fructose during pregnancy. So sugar from dessert, from chocolate, from muffins, from cupcakes, your baby needs none of this. Because if you have very high glucose levels during pregnancy, scientists have found that your baby's DNA will have epigenetic switches that are programming them towards having a higher vulnerability to develop diabetes, obesity, and psychiatric disorders.

Jessie Inchauspé: Next, this is basically the amount of protein that I needed to eat every single day in the third trimester of pregnancy.

Stephen Bartlett: Yeah.

Jessie Inchauspé: because the studies show low protein diets lead to smaller babies and potentially this epigenetic programming of staying smaller throughout life. And it's findings like that that led me to create a plan and simple hacks for pregnant moms and we can talk about them.

Stephen Bartlett: And then what does the research say about breastfeeding, exercise, caffeine, and also do you recommend that mothers take certain supplements?

Jessie Inchauspé: So this is what people need to know.

Stephen Bartlett: Jessie Inospay, the glucose goddess, for people that don't know who you are, what have you spent the best part of the last decade committing your life to and why?

Jessie Inchauspé: My work started in the glucose space, meaning the blood sugar space. I was showing people how blood sugar impacts all of us on a daily basis. The spikes and dips after we eat, they lead to inflammation, faster aging, cravings, fatigue, and it's been the basis of my work because glucose matters for everybody and it is the core of a healthy body and mind. And so that's where I started because it's so important.

Stephen Bartlett: We last spoke almost two years ago now. What have you learned in those last two years that has evolved your own thinking or has developed your own thinking in any way? If we reflect on the last conversations we had around glucose spikes and sugar and the health consequences and diets, is there anything you've learned in those two years that is interesting and new?

Jessie Inchauspé: Oh, absolutely. I think mostly the impact of glucose on mood and on relationships. For example, there's this fascinating study that took married couples and they gave the husband and the wives a little voodoo doll representing their spouse. And the researchers told the participants to put a little pin in the voodoo doll every time their spouse annoyed them. At the end of the two weeks, the researchers counted the number of pins in the voodoo dolls and they also measured the participants glucose levels. They found that the people who had the most glucose lows had put the most pins in the voodoo doll representing their spouse.

Stephen Bartlett: Wow.

Jessie Inchauspé: So, it's just an association, but it's interesting. And scientists then found that when you have very unsteady glucose levels, it impacts this neurotransmitter in your brain called tyrrosine that manages your mood. So, it seems that with unsteady glucose levels, your mood is less stable, which could then correlate to you be more annoyed at your spouse. So, I think studies like this have really blown my mind.

Stephen Bartlett: What's going on when we go through a glucose crash, per se?

Jessie Inchauspé: So, glucose is your body's energy. So, your brain is constantly monitoring how much glucose do we have in our bloodstream. And steady glucose is great. When your glucose levels crash, this indicates biologically that you're out of fuel. And this is a powerful signal to your body and your brain to say, "Alert, alert. We need food. We need more glucose." And so it creates all these downstream consequences on your mood. You become hangry. All you think about is food. You're in a bad mood. You're like, "I need to eat something." You look for a banana. You look for a cookie. It can also activate the craving center in your brain that says, "Steven, go find some chocolate." And science has shown this. Low glucose levels creates a cascade of consequences on how we feel and what we seek. Now, what's interesting is that back in the day when we had low glucose levels, I'm talking like hunter gatherer times, they wouldn't arrive so quickly because we didn't have these big spikes that then led to these big drastic drops. It was more we ate in a more balanced way with less sugar obviously. So, when our glucose became low, it was a bit more gradual. Today, because we have access to all this sugar, we can spike our glucose very quickly and as a result, it then crashes very quickly. So, the effects are pretty much immediate and they're very intense. All of a sudden, you go from feeling okay to your brain being in alert mode. We need to find more fuel. So, we've disregulated our glucose levels to the point where it's impacting us in a very unnatural way.

Stephen Bartlett: Is that in part because we modify our food? Even fruit. When I looked back through the history of fruit, apples, bananas, etc. looked extremely different before they were modified to be juicier and sweeter, etc.

Jessie Inchauspé: Completely. It's like dogs. So all the the dog breeds today from Chihuahua to golden retrievers, they all come from wolves. Humans have been breeding wolves together to create these different species of dogs. They all have that ancestor of the grey wolf. So humans are very good at breeding natural things to serve their purposes. And when it comes to fruit, it's the same thing. So as you say, if you compare like an ancestral banana or an ancestral apple to a modern one, they look completely different. And you should pull up these photos. They're fascinating. Ancestral banana, tiny, full of fiber, full of seeds, not very sweet. And then modern banana, full of sugar, low in fiber, really easy to eat. So that's the first thing people need to know about fruit. Fruit is not natural. Fruit is the product of human engineering. However, a piece of whole fruit also contains fiber and water. So even though it's been bred to have a lot of sugar, the fiber in the water reduce how quickly the sugar arrives in our bloodstream, making it more or less okay for us. But the problem comes when we denature that piece of fruit. Meaning if we remove the fiber, for example, if we take an orange and make an orange juice, what are we actually talking about here? Actually, oranges are not even a natural fruit. They were invented thousands of years ago by breeding by crossing other species of fruit. To make an orange juice, you throw away part of the orange. You throw away the solid part, which is the fiber. So, you're left with the sugar of a very sugary fruit, water, and no fiber. As a result, you're getting a very unnatural amount of sugar in your bloodstream with no fiber to protect the spike. So, a big big glucose spike. And people often say, "Oh, well, you know, fruit has vitamins in it, so therefore orange juice must be better for you than Coca-Cola." That's actually a total myth. If you compare a glass of orange juice to a glass of Coca-Cola, it's the same amount of sugar, about 25 grams. and the sugar in the can of Coke and the sugar in the glass of orange juice, they're exactly the same. They're glucose and fructose molecules, and your body absorbs them in the exact same way. Your body does not make a difference between sugar from an orange and sugar from a sugar beat that's now in a can of Coca-Cola. I I hope that orange juice disappears from school lunches, from hospital meals. The World Health Organization recommends 25 gram of sugar per day or less. So, with just one glass of orange juice in the morning that you squeeze at home that you think is good for you, you're already at the maximum limit of sugar recommendation. And most people drink this glass of orange juice thinking it's good for them. Most people with diabetes drink this glass of orange juice thinking it's helping them with their condition. And that's really where I want to act. I want to help people understand what they actually need to do to feel better so they don't fall victim to marketing.

Stephen Bartlett: We talked there about glucose crashes and what that causes in terms of behavior. I was wondering if also causes other compulsive behaviors. Does it make me more likely to want to doom scroll on the internet if I have been eating lots of sugar?

Jessie Inchauspé: Well, that's a great question. Why does sugar feel good? Because it releases dopamine in our brain. Dopamine is the pleasure molecule. It makes us feel good. So if I were to drink this glass of orange juice, which you would have to pay me a lot of money for me to drink this, but my brain would let out so many dopamine molecules and I would feel this wave of pleasure. Now the problem is people confuse that with energy. It's not energy, it's dopamine. And dopamine is the same exact molecule that gets released when you're scrolling on Instagram. You look for the next post, you look for the next video. Every time you get something new and interesting, bam, a dopamine signal as well in your brain. So, if you're constantly triggering dopamine in your brain, you're going to constantly crash. You're going to have dopamine spikes, dopamine crashes, and become more and more addicted to it. So, I don't know about studies showing glucose spikes, and for example, doom scrolling. But if you look at just the biology of it, they're triggering the same center in your brain. So, for sure, I can imagine that if you are on a dopamine binging or dopamine addiction cycle, both an orange juice and a glucose spike and doom scrolling can go hand in hand.

Stephen Bartlett: I was just looking at some research here and it says yes, you're significantly more likely to doom scroll during a glucose crash. And it explains that that's because of something called the energy crisis in the prefrontal cortex where your prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for willpower and decision-m and saying no to things like doom scrolling in the case where glucose drops. This area is first to dim the lights to save energy for vital functions. The result is you lose your executive function, making it nearly impossible to resist the hit of dopamine that social media provides. But it also says the second reason is this dopamine trap. And the third is generally your emotional regulation goes out of the window. I I think this in part because I notice in myself that when I am on a higher glucose diet, I'm more likely to get involved in like compulsive behaviors that I otherwise don't like.

Jessie Inchauspé: Yeah. You have less willpower, less control. You feel more addicted. And the first thing that people notice is that when they are on a glucose roller coaster, they feel addicted to sugar. like it's no longer a choice to go after that cookie, it feels like a compulsive behavior like I need sugar right now because that glucose crash is triggering a biological mechanism that is nearly impossible to override. So when you tell somebody just eat less sugar, that's that's BS. You can't just eat less sugar. You have to go fix the underlying cause, which is usually the glucose crash. You can't override that feeling of craving that comes from deep inside your brain when you have a glucose crash. You need to fix the spike, reduce the spike, and then naturally the spike also reduces and you feel fewer cravings. There's this theory called the protein leverage hypothesis. And this this theory says that your body will keep you hungry and keep you seeking food until you've given it enough protein. So if in the morning you have uh I don't know some oats and toast and jam, very little protein, your body's going to be like, "Okay, we didn't get any protein. We need to get more protein." So you stay more and more hungry. At 10 a.m. you're hungry again. If you have a cookie, again, no protein. Your body will keep you hungry. If all of a sudden you have 40 grams of protein, then that craving dissipates and that feeling of seeking out food sort of calms down because your body got what he actually needed, which was protein.

Stephen Bartlett: You've just given birth. Eight months ago. Yeah. Feels like just last week, but yeah, eight months ago. And um I guess that's somewhat linked to why you've written this new book, which is titled Nine Months That Count Forever: How Your Pregnancy Diet Shapes Your Baby's Future. You could have written about anything, Jesse, and people would have bought the book um because people are so fascinated by you and the work that you do. Why of all the subjects you could have written about was this the subject that meant the most to you to commit a long period of your life to?

Jessie Inchauspé: Because it is a subject where there's such a big gap, Stephen, between what science knows and what parents are told. It felt like there was a just canyon between information in the studies that's been there for decades and what I as a pregnant woman went through and what advice I was given, what's available out there to pregnant moms. So even though I was pregnant and I was tired, I felt I need to write this book because people need to know the power that they have. So today, science knows that you're not just an oven when you're pregnant. Have you heard this thing being a bun in the oven? It's an American expression. Uh, I think I've heard it once or twice. Yeah. Okay. So, often if you're pregnant, people will say, "Oh, you have a bun in the oven. That's so cute." It's like an expression. And I feel like this is where all of our problems started because it implies so many misleading things. It implies that when you're pregnant, you are an oven, meaning you're just there to provide heat and time. And people often say, "Just relax, you know, let nature do its thing." So, it implies that you're passive, that you have no agency, no power. You're just a vessel of heat and time. That's the first problem. The second problem is that it implies that just like a chocolate cake that you put in the oven, it implies that your baby, the moment the sperm meets the egg, your baby is set in stone. Like if you're making a cake, when you make the brownie and you put it in the oven, the oven is not going to change the brownie into banana bread. The oven is just cooking the brownie. Well, actually, it's very different with pregnancy. Your baby is not set in stone at conception. What happens during the nine months of pregnancy is co-creating your baby's plan. And depending on what you eat, a different baby will come out. So, we've been lying to pregnant moms, telling them they have no agency, they have no power, they should just relax and let nature do its thing. So, that's why I wrote this book because the science is fascinating.

Jessie Inchauspé: So while your baby's DNA is set the moment the sperm meets the egg with your diet during pregnancy, you're programming that DNA. Have you heard of epigenetics? Okay. So epigenetics are like these little dimmer switches that sit on your DNA and that say activate this gene or silence this gene. And so during pregnancy, you're putting these little switches on your baby's DNA. And this is going to have an impact on your baby's development and on his future risk of disease. I'll give you a very simple example. If you have very high glucose levels during pregnancy, scientists have found that your baby's DNA will have epigenetic switches that are programming him towards having a higher vulnerability to develop diabetes himself in his lifetime. So if you have high glucose levels, your baby will be programmed to be more likely to then have high glucose levels himself throughout his life as a kid, a teenager, and an adult. That's epigenetic programming. And depending on your diet as the mom, you can program your kids differently. But nobody tells moms about this. And that's what I'm trying to change.

Jessie Inchauspé: And so for the second and third trimesters, there's another organ that you create inside your uterus. It's called the placenta. And the placenta's job is to bring your baby's bloodstream and your bloodstream as the mom in really close contact. And all of a sudden, symbiosis is established. And your bloodstream and your baby's bloodstream are then going to exchange nutrients and waste. So your baby's going to get all his nutrition directly from your bloodstream. And Stephen, here's a main myth that people believe. They believe that your baby will just get what he needs from you during pregnancy. That's something moms are told. Don't worry, your baby will get what he needs from you. This is a lie. Depending on what you eat, your baby will have different access to important nutrients. So, your baby doesn't get what he needs. He gets what's there and what you give him. So, let's take a simple example. One of the nutrients that is really important is called choline. Have you heard about choline before? Is that in eggs? Yes, exactly. It's in the egg yolk. So, choline is super important. It forms your baby's brain in the womb. So, your baby your baby's brain has these cells that are forming called neurons, which are the ones that process information. And choline is important to creating those neurons. And choline creates the parts of your baby's brain that have to do with memory, learning, and attention. So that egg that you're holding contains about 125 milligs of choline and it's an incredible incredible substance. The thing is if you don't eat enough choline your baby's brain is not going to get enough choline and this can have an impact on the development of your child. So much so that the American Association of Pediatrics says failure to provide choline during this time can result in lifelong brain deficits in the baby.

Jessie Inchauspé: Today, 90% of moms are not getting enough choline during pregnancy. 90% of moms are not getting enough choline during pregnancy. Why? Because nobody is telling them about it. And because today we don't eat very nutritious nutritious foods anymore that contain a lot of choline. They're present in eggs. So four eggs a day gives you all the choline that you need. But choline is also present in organ meats like liver. Nobody eats liver anymore. Most of the foods that we eat today, cupcakes, dried fruits, burgers, chips, they don't contain a lot of choline. We need to be eating eggs. This is the simplest way to give enough choline to our baby. And scientists do these animal studies where they deprive moms from choline. And they look at the impact on the brain. And they see that brain development in the baby stops earlier than it should. And those babies are born with fewer neurons. The amount of choline in your diet during pregnancy is going to be impacting your child's brain development. And nobody's telling moms about this. It's really messed up. So, how many eggs a day do I need to eat while I'm pregnant to get enough choline? Four is the golden number. So, here I think we have 28 eggs. So, every day during pregnancy, I ate four eggs. So, this is the amount of eggs that I ate per week during the nine months of pregnancy. That's a lot of eggs. But as I was doing this, I knew I was giving my baby all the choline that he needed, which is about 450 mg per day. And this is not very expensive. 28 eggs is about $7. So for $1 a day, you're getting all the choline that your baby needs to form his brain.

Stephen Bartlett: What about sugar during pregnancy?

Jessie Inchauspé: So, sugar is fascinating. When you eat sugar, your baby is also receiving that sugar because that placenta lets the sugar through. And your baby doesn't need any sugar during pregnancy. He needs a little bit of glucose, which is different. But sugar, as in the very sweet molecule of fructose that is in chocolate, that is in these cupcakes, that is in dried fruit, your baby needs none of it. And the most interesting study on sugar in pregnancy actually came from the UK. So from 1940 to 1953, I don't know if you know this, but in the UK, there was a governmentmandated sugar ration, meaning for 13 years, the government controlled how much sugar people had access to. It was during the war and they were trying to manage resources. So everybody in the UK got 10 sugar cubes per day. That's it. And this is down from what people usually ate before the sugar ration, which was about 20 sugar cubes per day. So everybody, including pregnant moms, for 13 years had a capped amount of sugar. At the end of the sugar ration, after 13 years, bam, everybody went back up to eating more sugar. And so scientists in the early 2000s thought, well, that's really interesting. This means we have two groups of pregnant moms during the sugar ration and right after the sugar ration who had babies develop in their womb either with 40 grams of sugar per day or around 80 grams of sugar per day. And the scientists wondered, can this small difference be making an impact on the baby's long-term health? So, they called up 60,000 people who were born either just before the ration ended or just after and they asked them about their health. They were like, "Do you have diabetes? Do you have heart disease? How are you feeling? What's your weight? And they saw that the babies who were born and who were in the mother's womb during the sugar ration had 15% lower likelihood of having developed type 2 diabetes in their lifetime.

Jessie Inchauspé: There is some nuance, but that association holds very strongly. And as you said, 56 million mom baby pairs. So across the world, we see that when a mom has diabetes during pregnancy, her baby has a higher risk of psychiatric disorders. And the main theory that could explain this association has to do with the baby's brain. So your baby is forming his brain in the room. And today, Stephen, you have about a hundred billion neurons in your brain and they are the exact same neurons that you had the day you were born. Neurons never get replaced. So what does this mean? It means that your neurons that you have for life are formed during pregnancy in your mother's uterus. Now you have these neurons in the baby's brain being formed 250,000 per minute. Pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, neurons everywhere. And next to the neurons, you have another type of cell. This cell is called the micro ga. And it kind of looks like a starfish, and it's patrolling the baby's brain. And it's job is to make sure that the neurons are forming properly. So what micro ga do, they're a cell from the immune system, is they are on the lookout for any neurons that are being damaged or not formed properly. And as soon as they find a neuron that is not ideal, they go over to it and they eat it and they destroy it. So they're pruning the brain and they're looking out for damage and making sure everything develops normally. Now if the mother has high inflammation levels during pregnancy and this can be caused by a number of things. It can be caused by high glucose levels. It can be caused by infection. It can be caused by chemicals. High inflammation seems to be making these micro ga overactive. Now all of a sudden they become a bit deregulated and they start eating and destroying neurons that don't need to be destroyed. They start destroying healthy neurons and as a result the brain is forming in a slightly suboptimal fashion. And scientists believe this to be the leading theory behind why we see the association between gestational diabetes, so diabetes of pregnancy and a higher risk of psychiatric disorders.

Jessie Inchauspé: Completely. And a lot of the glucose hacks that I've talked about, they actually mirror a lot of traditions. So for example, the glucose hack of having your vegetables at the beginning of your meal. This is incredibly powerful, pregnancy or not pregnancy, because vegetables contain fiber. And when you have them at the beginning of your meal, they create this protective mesh in your intestine that slows down the glucose molecules from carbs and makes the glucose molecules arrive more slowly into your bloodstream, meaning smaller spike. ... The best thing to do is to move your body. So get up, find a spot in your apartment that needs to be tidied. Find a place you got to vacuum. Find some find some laundry to do and do that within 90 minutes after eating. Your muscles are your best ally in reducing your glucose spikes after you've eaten. ... Calf raises. Yeah. Okay. So, put your feet on the ground, Stephen. Yeah. And just do some calf push-ups. Calf raises. So you go up onto the ends of your feet and back down. ... So as you do this, there's a muscle in your calf called the soles muscle. Can you feel it contract? It's your calf muscle. Okay. So this muscle is very good at soaking up glucose from your bloodstream. So easy hack you can do after you eat something sweet is you just do some calf raises at your desk like this. Nobody can notice. Five minutes and that's going to help reduce the glucose spike of what you just ate.

Jessie Inchauspé: I think protein. By the time your baby's born, he is about 50% protein if you exclude water. So protein is not just for your muscles. Protein forms your immune system, your skin, your organs, many many tissues, many many signaling molecules in your body. So when you're pregnant, you need to eat more protein to give more protein to your baby. ... these animal studies suggest that if you have a low protein diet, your baby will be programmed to stay smaller and have smaller muscle mass throughout his life. ... So I would have four eggs in the morning. That's about 30 grams of protein. And then I would have to have three good servings of protein represented by the three chicken breasts here. ... I took omega-3 supplements because omega-3s also form the baby's brain and they come from algae in the ocean and fish. Now, omega-3s and in particular one omega-3 called DHA, it helps your baby's neurons connect with each other. ... The easiest way to get enough DHA is to eat fish or to eat sardines that we have here. So, the recommendation is fatty fish twice a week. I would say fatty fish three times a week if you can. And this is also it's amazing because it's very cheap.

Jessie Inchauspé: Yes. Correct. So I got pregnant the first time and I thought everything would be totally fine but I found out at the 3mon scan that the embryo had stopped developing. I had what's called a silent miscarriage. ... Listen, for me it was so devastating. It was so so difficult. I didn't I didn't want to believe it. I was screaming. I remember like falling to the floor in my living room and saying to whatever god or the universe like that I wanted my baby back. ... One in five pregnancies and in miscarriage. ... And then I got pregnant again in August 2024. And my son was born in May 2025. So, I got pregnant quite quickly afterwards. Um, but it was difficult because I was still carrying the grief of the miscarriage. So, I had a very anxious pregnancy. I was very anxious the whole time that something bad would happen again, that I would miscarry again and not know about it. It was very difficult.

Jessie Inchauspé: The closing message is pregnancy is complicated. The food system we live in is complicated and toxic. And this is a very simple four-step trimester by trimester plan that doesn't require a lot of money that is going to help you give your baby the best foundation during development. ... I'm hoping this book will fill it. I'm hoping like this is pie in the sky. Like why don't we prescribe nine months that count forever to every parent that gets pregnant.

Stephen Bartlett: Amen, Jesse. Thank you. ... highly recommend. Great book to buy for someone as a gift if you just found out that someone in your life is pregnant, but also a great book to buy for you and your partner if you're going through your own pregnancy journey or thinking about getting pregnant soon.