Breathe
By Edmée Pardo
I follow on Instagram Jessie Inchauspé, the French mathematician and biochemist who revolutionized the understanding of the effects of glucose in the body, better known as the Glucose Goddess. Her contribution to the culture of eating habits, directly counteracts the growing rise of patients with diabetes 1 and 2. If we incorporate her method as part of our daily lives, the positive effects on public health policies will be visible in the short, medium and long term.
When Jessie was about to choose a career and couldn't decide between math and another degree, her stepfather gave her advice, "Choose the hardest thing, now that you can do it." She chose math and enabled her mind to discern information in a way that few scientists can achieve. Because of his work at 23andme, a biotechnology and genomics company, he discovered that his moods were directly related to blood glucose spikes. As he understood and controlled the glycogen curves, he reduced the psychiatric medications he was taking to a minimum because the big trigger for emotional imbalance was sugar spikes. He dedicated himself to investigate the effect of glucose on memory, emotions, blood and almost all organs; he decided to disseminate his knowledge always backed up by scientifically valid documents. The big problem was that the papers were difficult to understand for the uninitiated and his message, his epiphany, could not be made known. That is where mathematical language helps him and he designed an effective way of communicating by means of graphs: two compared images accompanied by a line informing about the effect of blood glucose before and after certain foods. His communication technique removed the obscurantist veil on the subject and suddenly his Instagram account exploded. We were all thirsty to know more, but we could not approach the subject: the reading was encrypted, we did not understand the concept.
