Should you follow your blood sugar with a continuous glucose monitor? : NPR

The device itself is small, but the hype around it is big.

Continuous glucose monitors are only about the size of A Quarter, but the companies that you sell make great demands on your health advantages: You can “Revolutionize your health“A company says.

President Trump’s candidate for General surgeon, Dr. Casey meansis a prominent supporter of continuous glucose monitoring. She Co -founded a company This distributes the devices and sells an app to help people use them.

The monitor is a painless stain that sticks to your skin. It sends a signal to an app on your phone with an estimate of your blood sugar about every few minutes. (It measures the sugar concentration between your skin cells, which correlates roughly with your blood sugar level.) With the app, the app also helps you to keep a protocol over everything you eat so that you can track down how different foods have your blood sugar on your blood sugar.

Studies have shown that this technology has changed the care of people with diabetes. “It revolutionized the life and life of the family,” says Elizabeth is obviouswho researches diabetes at Johns Hopkins University.

But in March 2024 the Food and Drug Administration Administration approved the first Continuous glucose monitors for people without diabetes. They are currently making two companies: Dexcom And Debott. Each patch takes about two weeks and costs about 50 US dollars. The pursuit of your blood sugar for a longer period costs around $ 100 per month.

The critical question is: do you actually help people? without Diabetes or prediabetes improve your health?

The theory

After eating a meal that contains carbohydrates, the blood sugar of a healthy person increases the summit and then gently falls back to the baseline.

“These peaks and hollows are the normal physiological reaction to consuming carbohydrates in humans without diabetes,” says nutritionist Sarah BerryProfessor of nutrition at King’s College London. Berry is too Chief scientist at ZoeA company that distributes continuous glucose monitors (CGMS) and an app to interpret the data. “We don’t have to flatten these curves,” she says.

However, problems can arise if these peaks become too often and too high, says Berry. This could expose them to a higher risk obesityPresent CancerPresent Cardiovascular diseases And Type -2 -DiabetesShow studies. It can also make them hungry between meals, says Berry, so that they will eat more at the next meal.

The idea behind the glucose monitoring is that you can help you identify certain meals or meals that create extreme peaks. If you then change the meal, this shift can help you lose weight, reduce the risk of diabetes or just feel better.

The results

Two main studies tested this theory with randomized control studies. In the studies, people wore a glucose monitoring patch for a certain period of time while persecuted what they had eaten in an app. The researchers used the data to design a personalized diet to lower blood sugar. Then the scientists tested how well this CGM-based diet stacked against a low-fat or Mediterranean diet.

At the population level the The results were mixed. In a study at the Weizmann Institute of Science, the CGM-based diet did not help people lose more weight than only follow the Mediterranean diet. However, it helped them to lower their blood sugar more. Scientists reported In the magazine Diabetes care.

The second study compared the CGM-based diet with a low-fat, highly granular diet. On average, both diets led to the same weight loss and low improvements in blood sugar, researcher at New York University registered in the journal Jama Network Open And The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. But Collin Popp, Anyone who contributed to leading this study said that the overall results do not tell the whole story. These conclusions only show the average reaction in the entire population, says Popp.

“If you look at the individual level, it is very different,” he says. For some people, the approach of glucose monitoring helped enormously. Some people have lost a large amount of weight. “We had people back and said: ‘You changed my life. I lost 30 pounds and feel great.’ Other people in the study have led to weight.

Now scientists are trying to find out who benefits from this technology.

If glucose monitors could be useful

1. If you are very sensitive to carbohydrates

Nutritionist Karen Kennedy Has helped people for five years to interpret and understand their data. In their experience, these devices help some people to discover increased sensitivity to carbohydrates, even for healthy versions such as whole grain products.

“You eat brown rice, quinoa, beans, rice or oatmeal, and your blood sugar is consistently very high,” she says.

The monitor helps you to recognize that you will better deal with your blood sugar with a low -carbohydrate diet. “No carbohydrates, but lower carbohydrates,” says Kennedy.

“You change your diet and then your blood sugar comes down dramatically,” says Kennedy. “If you can maintain this new diet, feel better and Lose visceral fat. “

2. If you need additional motivation to eat healthier foods

Many people already know what to do to improve their metabolic health. But to put this advice into practice – this is difficult to say both Kennedy and Nyus Popp.

The quick feedback from a continuous glucose monitor can give you a push to actually implement nutritional advice. “It’s a motivator,” says Popp.

For example, one of Kennedy’s customers clearly had to add more protein and fat to his breakfast.

“You said, ‘Sorry, but that’s my breakfast, and it has worked for me for 30 years.'”

Then the client wore a patch for a week and saw breakfast shot her blood sugar super high. You immediately changed your breakfast, says Kennedy. Immediately the customer could see how this new breakfast improved its blood sugar level.

“You didn’t have to wait a few months and go to the doctor to see that it works,” she says. “This agency can be motivating.”

3. If you need more awareness of your diet

In the study on the NYU, some people benefited greatly from the CGM-based diet. When Popp and his colleague were deeper into their data, they found a key factor for this success: whether the person consistently registered their meals in the device’s app about the six -month experiment.

For some people to simply document what they ate, helped them improve their diet and their blood sugar levels, says Popp. “I tell people all the time: ‘Surveillance what they do can play a major role in their health.’

“And you don’t have to record the food exactly,” he adds. “It is the mere act of documenting that is important for most people.”

“We know that awareness helps people lose weight,” added John’s Hopkins’ Selvin. “And it does not have to be with an app. I have a colleague who uses a small pocket notor. It adds accountability” – and it is cheaper than glucose monitoring.

Before you decide to buy the device, experts say, be aware:

Many people find the data confusing and not helpful.

“Many people come to me and say: ‘I have been using the device for three or even 12 months and have all this data, but I don’t know what it means. I don’t know how to lower or improve my blood sugar,” says Kennedy.

People really have to be informed about what the data means, Popp agrees. But this training will only go so far, because at that time some of the data is still mysterious for scientists and doctors.

If you stay in a normal area, e.g. B. about 70 mg/dl up to 140 mg/dl, the scientists still don’t understand what the summits and lows mean.

“There are no real standard guidelines for a good climax or a bad highlight in non -diabetics,” says Popp.

The data can be misleading.

First of all, the devices are not super precise or accurate, and our body does not always react to the same food. A recently carried out study In The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that the same meal showed very different readings on two different days. Another little studyIn the same magazine, it found that the continuous glucose monitor overestimated the blood sugar level of people compared to the direct measurement of the blood.

Second, the data can make people worry about healthy foods – or even to stop – that cause normal blood sugar fluctuations. For example, Popp has a friend who was worried about blueberries because they climb their blood sugar slightly and then lean back.

“You don’t want to start marking food as ‘unhealthy’ just because it led to what I saw as a tiny blood sugar spike.”

Third, some people can have normal blood sugar levels, but still have insulin resistance, explains Kennedy. In this case, your bodies compensate for overproduced insulin. To find out this, you would have to see a doctor and have your insulin levels checked.

“Continuous glucose is a practical metric,” she says. “But it’s just a metric, and you have to use it in the context of laboratory results and other signs and symptoms.”

Published by Jane Greenhalgh