Nicole Spartano doesn’t have diabetes. However the Boston College epidemiologist has sometimes worn a steady glucose monitor, or CGM, a tool as soon as reserved for these with the situation. Her want to know how components resembling meals, sleep and train affect her blood sugar ranges stems from her personal analysis into how CGMs may assist people push back illnesses like diabetes and really feel more healthy total.
Individuals with diabetes use CGMs to observe their blood sugar stage and want for supplementary insulin, the hormone (produced naturally in most individuals) that allows cells to eat that sugar for much-needed vitality. Much less is understood, although, about methods to interpret CGM readings in individuals with out the situation, Spartano and others say.
Nonetheless, the units’ reputation has exploded lately. That’s partially due to endorsements from influencers like Casey Means, President Donald Trump’s nominee for U.S. surgeon normal. In her 2024 e book, Good Vitality, Means, who cofounded an organization that sells the units, touted CGMs as “essentially the most highly effective know-how for producing the info and consciousness to rectify our Dangerous Vitality disaster within the Western world.”
Final 12 months, the U.S. Meals and Drug Administration accepted the sale of CGMs with out a prescription. A single machine, which generally lasts for 2 weeks and is then discarded, retails for roughly $50. CGMs connect to the arm or stomach through a small, sensor-equipped needle that sits in interstitial fluid just under the pores and skin. Glucose passes from the blood into that fluid. The sensors then transmit knowledge each jiffy to a receiver or smartphone.
Based mostly on typical blood assessments, blood sugar ranges from 70 to 140 milligrams per deciliter whereas not fasting are extensively thought-about optimum. Frequent spikes and extended time above that vary have been linked to an elevated threat of growing heart problems, in addition to fatigue and nervousness.
As a result of individuals’s responses to meals fluctuate extensively, CGMs can be utilized to develop customized weight-reduction plan plans, says Ruchi Mathur, an endocrinologist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Heart in Los Angeles. Mathur advises curious sufferers to deal with the CGM as an experiment. If a affected person needs to know the way they reply to a tuna sandwich, they may go along with white bread someday and wheat the following.
However decoding CGM knowledge is complicated. The identical meal might immediate totally different glucose responses from one week to the following, researchers reported in January within the American Journal of Scientific Diet. And Spartano and her crew discovered that almost all people with out diabetes spend roughly three hours per day with blood sugar ranges above 140 mg/dL. If CGMs change into normal well being instruments, the optimum glycemic vary may have a rethink, the crew notes. CGM readings don’t but translate to broadly relevant medical steering. When Spartano requested clinicians if sure sufferers’ complicated CGM readings indicated a necessity for additional testing, they hardly ever agreed.
“We wish to have the ability to inform [people], ‘This appears regular. This appears irregular,’” Spartano says. “We don’t actually know what’s regular.”
There’s no normal method to interpret CGM knowledge, concurs Vijaya Surampudi, an endocrinologist and diet professional at UCLA Well being. However practitioners aware of the units can assist sufferers interpret their knowledge. When Surampudi advises sufferers with out diabetes to attempt CGMs, she additionally recommends that they monitor meals, stressors, sleep and train.
Spartano says don’t put an excessive amount of inventory in CGM knowledge. Her outcomes confirmed that scarfing rice stored her glucose ranges flat, whereas chewing it slowly triggered a spike. She might have concluded that she ought to inhale her meal to dam her physique from processing the sugars. However well being is way broader than a single metric. Scarfing meals can encourage overeating or forestall nutrient absorption. Blood sugar, she says, “shouldn’t be all we give attention to.”
