Every Big Blood Sugar Spike Cooks You a Little From the Inside
The browning that crisps roast chicken is also happening in your body, and big blood sugar spikes speed it up.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett · Glucose Goddess: The 10 Glucose Hacks!You are slowly cooking from the inside, in much the same way a chicken browns in the oven.
That is how Jessie Inchauspé, a biochemist who studies blood sugar, describes glycation. It is the technical word for browning in the body, and it happens to everyone from birth. When you are fully browned, she says, you die.
It starts with a spike. After you eat starches or sugars, a rush of glucose enters the blood. Your cells have tiny factories called mitochondria that turn that glucose into energy for the brain, heart, eyes, and ears. Give them a steady supply and they hum along, but flood them and they get overwhelmed.
Inchauspé compares them to houseplants. A plant needs some water, but too much water drowns it. Mitochondria are similar. Overloaded with glucose, they get stressed, slow down, and make energy poorly. That is one reason a big spike can leave you with lasting tiredness rather than lasting fuel.
The second consequence is browning. The pink to brown change in roast chicken, or in toast in a toaster, is glycation at work. Inside you, excess glucose drives the same kind of change. Inchauspé points to cartilage, the smooth cushion in joints, which is white in babies and brown by age 90.
Every large spike, she says, speeds that process a little. The outside sign is skin that wrinkles faster. The inside sign is organs that slowly take damage. The words sound alike for a reason, glucose does the glycating.
Your body tries to limit the harm with a third response. It calls on the pancreas to release insulin, a hormone that grabs extra glucose and stashes it in the liver and muscles first, then in fat cells.
A few small rises are not the issue. It is repeated big spikes that keep stressing the energy factories, browning tissue, and demanding more insulin, a cycle that gets harder to control the longer it runs.
Questions people ask
If I eat less sugar, will I actually get fewer wrinkles?
Glycation is only one part of skin aging, alongside sun exposure, smoking, and plain time, but lower and steadier blood sugar means less extra glycation over the years. Dermatologists still rank daily sun protection as the most powerful anti-wrinkle step. Think of steadier glucose as slowing one oven dial, not turning aging off.
Can expensive skin creams undo glycation?
No cream can uncook tissue that has already browned inside. Most creams work on the surface by adding moisture or protecting against sun, which helps appearance but does not reach the internal process. Inchauspé argues that what you eat affects browning more directly than what you put on your skin.
Is some browning inevitable even with a perfect diet?
Yes. Even with steady blood sugar, the body runs on glucose and slowly glycates over a lifetime, which is why aging happens to everyone. The point is speed. Fewer large spikes means slower browning, not no browning at all.