Professor Sarah Berry

speaker

555 appearances 6 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 28 Jul

Professor Sarah Berry’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.

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ZOE Science & Nutrition · How to eat sugar without gaining weight (crush your cravings and end energy crashes) | Prof Tim Spector & Prof Sarah Berry · 23 Jul 2026 podcast

You consume your drink, your food, whatever that contains these.

What happens is it passes into the gastrointestinal tract.

So it goes to your stomach, enters your small intestine.

You have enzymes there in the case of sucrose that break apart the glucose from the fructose molecule.

If in the US you're having your food that's sweetened with the high fructose corn syrup, the glucose and the fructose are already separated.

So you don't have that initial breakdown.

These simple sugars, the glucose and the fructose, then pass through the lining of our small intestine, the cells that we call enterocytes, that enter the bloodstream.

The fructose goes to the liver where it's reprocessed to either create more glucose or processed to create fat, triglycerides.

And then the glucose circulates in the blood for a little bit to go to various places.

So you have quite a short, sharp increase in circulating blood glucose.

It peaks around 15 to 30 minutes, depending on the source of food that it's come from, returns to baseline around two hours, again, depending on the food source that it's come from.

When it circulates in the blood, some goes to the liver where it's used for storage, some goes immediately to cells, to muscles, some to your brain, etc., where the cells use it for immediate energy.

And I think this is really important to pick up on insulin.

So within minutes of glucose hitting your bloodstream, you release the hormone insulin.

The hormone insulin is really important to control that level of blood glucose because at high levels it is toxic.

And then it kind of, in simple terms, moves the glucose out of the bloodstream to the different places.

And insulin plays a really important role in what we call glucose dynamics.

So in the shape of the glucose curve after you've had a meal.

And it's quite relevant to how also different foods impact our glucose response, which we can pick up on a bit later.

So increase in circulating blood glucose after consuming sugar or any carbohydrate is a normal physiological response.

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