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

It's a normal physiological response that our bodies are well able to handle because of the production of hormones like insulin and some other gut hormones as well that control those levels very carefully.

The problem is, is that we're now consuming foods that release glucose often very quickly into our bloodstream.

we're consuming foods that also might have excessive amounts of sugar.

And so the kind of foods that many of us are eating now tend to elicit, so bring about a bigger increase in circulating blood glucose than many of the more natural whole foods that we would have been eating years ago.

And so we are exposed to greater excursions, so greater peaks, and also interestingly, greater dips in circulating blood glucose.

I think as well, Jonathan, what some of the new evidence is showing where sugar is particularly problematic is where it's consumed in an environment of excess calories.

So we shouldn't fear sugar itself because we have evolved to handle small amounts of sugar, episodic sugar, etc.

But where we're getting the problems is where we're in this environment where people are generally consuming excessive amounts of calories and where that excessive amount of calories is coming from sugar.

That's where we're seeing that it's becoming a problem.

And the other thing that I don't think people talk about enough as well is where sugar causes a dip in circulating blood glucose.

So we're very focused, if you look in any social media about this peak in circulating glucose, God forbid, you should flatline your glucose.

No, where I think that there's a real problem is that if you have sugar, particularly added sugar, this is free sugar that's not in a kind of food structure.

So the kind of sugar you would have from a can of Coke, for example, or from a chocolate bar.

What happens is that when the sugar enters your bloodstream, you release insulin.

And quite often, because it's entering your bloodstream so quickly, you have this overshoot of insulin.

You have too much insulin.

That overshoot of insulin tries to very, very quickly get the sugar, the glucose out of your bloodstream.

And so because of that overshoot of insulin, you have this dip in circulating glucose about two to four hours later.

That dip in circulating glucose, we know from our own ZOE research, causes people to consume their next meal sooner, causes people, if they have that dip, to consume about 320 calories more over a day, which is huge.

Causes people to feel less energetic, less alert, lower mood.

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