Ben Greenfield

So I don't use digestive enzymes when I'm having a smoothie.

But pretty much every meal, like if I go out to a restaurant, like I actually take one of those little pill capsules and I put digestive enzymes in there.

I mean, before is good, but if you forget, you can take it after.

Most of the things that would be like blood sugar stabilizers, digestive enzymes, gallbladder support, taking them before the meal is best.

But if you forget, you can still get benefits by taking them after.

Set them on top of the food.

Mostly unlocking more nutrients from food because they're basically breaking down the food better.

So you have like proteases that break down protein, amylases that break down protein.

You actually make salivary amylase in your mouth, which is why if you put a cracker in your mouth and you pay attention, it starts to taste sweet because the salivary amylase automatically starts to turn the cracker into more simple carbohydrates, which tastes sweet.

And then lipase is the last one that would be for fats, for lipids, lipase.

So if you look at a good digestive enzyme, usually it'll have a protease or some form of protease, some kind of amylase, and some kind of a lipase in it.

I think it's most important with protein because protein would technically be the hardest to break down.

Now, if you think about it, like if you were to take a bunch of digestive enzymes with carbs, and a lot of people are concerned about like spiking their blood glucose now, your blood glucose would spike more because you're breaking down the carbs faster.

But there are other things that you can take with carbs that a lot of people are doing now that lower the blood sugar response to a meal.

Like what?

they're called gdas glucose disposal agents they're things that basically like help shove glucose out of the bloodstream and into the muscle more readily one of the ways that they that they do that is either a by increasing insulin sensitivity right so basically the cell receptors are more sensitive to the activity of insulin insulin is going to help shove glucose into the cells

Or they increase the expression of the transporters that pull glucose into, say, like muscle.

So an example of a glucose disposal agent would be berberine.

Dihydroberberine is kind of like a more powerful version of berberine.

Some people call it like nature's metformin because it lowers blood glucose pretty well.