Is This One Healthy Food Secretly Spiking Your Blood Sugar? An Expert Explains

Maintaining healthy blood sugar levels is key to supporting overall health, including your mood and energy. Although, keeping those levels balanced is no simple task: You may be familiar with some of the most common glucose-spiking foods—white bread, white potatoes, pasta, and more—but some sneakier ingredients can also unexpectedly have the same effect.

Biochemist Jessie Inchauspe, author of Glucose Revolution: The Life-Changing Power of Balancing Your Blood Sugar, clued us in to a few of these on the mindbodygreen podcast. One of the most surprising? Dates.

The reason why dates have such a profound impact on blood sugar is because they are dried fruits: "As soon as you denature a piece of fruit—whether you concentrate it to put in yogurt, you juice it to make an orange juice, or you dry it and use it for its sweetness—you're creating a big glucose spike in your body," Inchauspe explains. "Your body does not know the difference between sugar coming from fruit or sugar coming from a can of [soda]. It's all processed the same."

While dates can cause glucose spikes, the solution is not to avoid them: "I really don't believe in restricting at all. I think that it can be really damaging," Inchauspe explains. Rather, Inchauspe shares a simple way to mitigate their effects on blood sugar.

First up? "Put clothing on your carbs. Any time you eat something starchy or sweet, if you add protein, fat, or fiber—which I call clothing—you can reduce the glucose spike that that starchy or sweet food would create."