Courtesy of Gayle Pagano/Nutrisense
“I basically had to get sick to have coverage for getting sick,” Pagano told Business Insider.
After reading about how age-related hormone changes can affect blood sugar, she started tracking hers, and noticed a pattern. Eating refined carbs like bread spiked her blood sugar, and she felt worse. Even ostensibly healthy foods like salads seemed to be a problem if they were store-bought.
“It’s been shocking. The things you would think are OK to eat, they’re just not,” she said.
With the help of a nutritionist, she started making changes. Growing up in an Italian home, Pagano was reluctant to give up pasta, but found she could still enjoy some carbs with simple habits like making the noodles herself and eating protein first.
Since then, she’s lost 50 pounds, and saw dramatic improvements to her fasting glucose, fasting insulin, and A1c (a measure of average blood sugar levels).
Can you really prevent diseases by monitoring your blood sugar?
Pagano isn’t alone in struggling to get medical care in the gray area between borderline health metrics and an active diagnosis.
In the typical healthcare paradigm, you may have to wait months or even years for regular checkups to detect a problem. Companies are positioning CGMs as a way to cut out the waiting game — what if you could proactively control your health before developing an illness?
“By giving people access to their own health data, they can understand with a lot more clarity exactly where they stand and whether the choices they’re making are having the impact that they want rather than having to wait six months or a year down the road for just a scrap of information given them to them by their doctor,” Means said.
She said it it isn’t a matter of telling people to ditch carbs or start intermittent fasting. It’s about giving people tools to understand what works for them.
CGMs are great giving you a peek at your body’s inner workings in real time, accurately reflecting your blood sugar levels at a given moment, and showing how those levels change in response to certain habits.
The problem is that science isn’t very good at telling us exactly what those numbers mean yet. While CGMs can help people with diabetes avoid dangerous extremes, it’s not clear what happens between those upper and lower extremes.
That doesn’t mean Pagano or Jacobs are wrong about the benefits — it just means we’re operating in a scientific gray area.
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Social influencers with no apparent medical expertise point to blood sugar spikes to warn against eating healthy foods like fruit or rice, saying they cause brain fog, weight gain, and various catastrophic health issues.
“Disordered eating or having a poorer relationship with food is a significant issue, and I think it’s plausible that using a CGM or tracking could potentially lead certain people who are susceptible toward that,” Dr. Jonathan Little, a professor at the University of British Columbia who specializes in metabolism, told Business Insider.
Research doesn’t support the fear that rising blood sugar after a meal is cause for concern in otherwise healthy people.
“What makes me perturbed is when people use statements like ‘those are prediabetes glucose levels’, or ‘I ate this and my glucose went to diabetes levels,'” Klonoff said, “We don’t have the evidence to know that’s a bad thing.”
So, should you wear a CGM?
Little predicts that CGMs will soon be another standard metric collected by everyday electronics along with data like our step count, heart rate, or sleep scores.
People want more information about the inner workings of their bodies, and health wearables can also be a status symbol to tout your health-conscious cred.
Not everyone is happy about this looming trend. People with diabetes have raised concerns that people who need the devices can’t afford them, and rising popularity of the tech could make access even harder. However, widespread use could also drive innovations, like over-the-counter options, that may make CGMs cheaper for everyone, as some market reporting suggests.
Little and other metabolism experts are not convinced that wearables can give us more actionable data than we already know.
Do you need an arm patch to make the point that nutrient-dense carbs like whole grains and fruit are healthy, or that chowing down on ultra-processed food may make you feel worse over time?
“I don’t think for the typical exercising person or person trying to optimize health, knowing blood sugar levels at every time of day is super helpful,” Little said.