I was wearing a glucose monitor on a long bike ride when I ate a bag of jalapeño cheese puffs. What can I say, things happen (even to healthy living advocates).
My blood sugar rose to 170.
And not just for a few minutes. It stayed elevated for hours after.
That got my attention.
Not because cheese puffs are “bad.” Not because I think every spike is a crisis. But because this is exactly how modern food fools us: it looks casual, light, even a little harmless, while behaving very differently in the body.
These puffs are a perfect example of what I mean by a constructed snack.
They’re not jalapeños, cheese, and corn in any whole-food sense. They’re made from degermed corn meal, oil, cheese powders, milk solids, flavorings, and seasonings, all engineered into an airy, crunchy, highly palatable shape. In other words: a composite food. A food built from separated parts and reassembled into something that goes down fast and asks very little of your body in terms of digestion.
That matters.
Because when you take a food apart like that, you change the experience your body has with it. The original structure is gone. The fiber is basically gone. What’s left is starch that’s easy to absorb, fat that makes it irresistible, and flavor that keeps you reaching back into the bag.
So yes, it can absolutely send blood sugar up fast.
And in my case, it did this even on a long bike ride, when you’d think I was “earning” it. That’s another way we get fooled. We assume exercise cancels out what food is made of. Sometimes it helps, of course. But it doesn’t magically turn an ultra-processed composite snack back into corn on the cob.
Your body still has to deal with the construction of the food.
That’s the real lesson here.
Getting fooled by food doesn’t mean you’re naive. It means you’re living in a food environment full of products designed to look simple while acting like precision-engineered delivery systems for quick energy. “Made with real jalapeño, aged cheddar, and blue cheese” sounds like food. But the blood sugar response told a more honest story.
This is why I care so much about helping people understand food processing.
Not calories.
Not willpower.
Not whether you were “good” today.
Just: what is this food made of, and what kind of experience is it creating in my body?
Yours in joyful living,
Rebecca
Members, see you at 11 am EST today!
Simple Measure To Keep Blood Sugar Steady
