[anonfornoreason]

I would recommend anyone to experiment with this. I did, and found out I was more glucose sensitive than I expected. This led me to get more broad labs done, with which I was able to find additional treatable issues that are likely the cause. If I hadn't done this, I would have found out via symptoms years later, after irreversible damage had already been done.

You are your only medical advocate, no one else is going to do it for you. The standard of care is shit, don't rely on it.

[Aurornis]

Read up on what's normal, though.

I tried a CGM twice. I triggered the hypoglycemia (blood sugar too low) alarm multiple times, but felt completely fine.

After some research I discovered it's actually not uncommon for healthy people to have occasional dips below the preset hypoglycemia threshold, but as long as you're not having symptoms then there's no cause for concern.

I also talked to a doctor who complained that she had multiple patients showing up with concerns about their glucose numbers for various reasons after trialing CGMs, but they had similar spurious and unimportant problems (brief excursions out of range, etc.).

So if you're going to experiment, at least familiarize yourself with what's truly problematic. It's easy to misinterpret the data if you don't know what it means.

[dreewf]

Freestyle libre has a lot of hypoclyemia events due to pressure on the sensor. If you roll over at night, or lean on the sensor it reads way too low. It’s very annoying since you can’t disable the alarm, I have to turn off the Bluetooth at night. Similarly when you go into very cold water it will read lower incorrectly.

[happytiger]

That’s some sage advice.

People are often surprised when I tell them about the insane levels of pre-diabetes in the US:

> The National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion notes that approximately 96 million U.S. adults aged 18 years and older (38% of the adult population) have prediabetes, and nearly 80% of them are unaware that they have it.

It’s honestly insane to continue a way of life that’s doing this to the majority of the population.

https://www.uspharmacist.com/article/prediabetes-trends-amon....

[narrator]

The other insane thing is studies have shown that type 2 diabetes can be reversed by fasting. Fasting is problematic to the medical industry because it is zero cost.

"Some studies found that patients were able to reverse their need for insulin therapy during therapeutic intermittent fasting protocols with supervision by their physician."

https://clindiabetesendo.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/...

[Aaronstotle]

This is why it made me upset to see this Doctor on TikTok telling people unless you have Diabetes, you don't need a glucose monitor and making fun of people who had one.

Where is the harm in getting data on how your own body deals with glucose?

[queuebert]

False positives in medicine can cause unnecessary interventions that carry their own risks. Believe it or not, there is an optimum level of ignorance for maximum health.

[Aurornis]

> Where is the harm in getting data on how your own body deals with glucose?

We have a relatively good indicator of long-term glucose levels: HbA1c blood testing. It's included in a lot of physicals now because it's relatively cheap. It's not 100% sensitive to every possible condition, but it's quite good as a screening mechanism for the general population.

CGMs will often give an "estimated HbA1c" value based on statistics from the collected data.

The challenge with CGMs is that it can he harder to know what's "normal" or not than you might think. There are a lot of stories of people becoming unnecessarily worried about occasional spikes or dips that are virtually inconsequential in the grand scheme of things.

[akira2501]

> Where is the harm in getting data on how your own body deals with glucose?

That's not what you're actually measuring though. You're just measuring instantaneous blood sugar levels.

You're hoping that your process for correlating this data with other events and trends in your life is accurate and useful. Unless you're planning on bringing a lot of documentation and other data recording to pair with this, it's not likely this single data point is going to beneficially change outcomes for you.

[rockooooo]

There are downsides to over-medicating, even if your personal budget for health is ~unlimited. Nobody wants to be a false positive.

[epistasis]

Agreed, this is one of the better things I have done to take control of my own health!

It was very very surprising which foods, and quantities of foods, caused huge spikes.

However, this stuff is difficult to interpret. What should be the goal number for managing glucose spikes? What's good, what's bad? Ultimately there's a lot of judgement calls, just as there is with any health or fitness goal.

I learned a lot from Peter Attia's podcasts, but that required hours of listening.

My doctor offered to review my data with me, which was amazing. But many people's primary care docs may not have the experience or time.

[anonfornoreason]

+1 +1 +1 to Peter Attia, huge amounts of great content. My philosophy is that if there's any single topic where I should be spending five hours a month researching, it's personal health.

As far as spikes are concerned, I convinced my wife and my dad to both try out the same CGM. Neither of them really ever had any spikes of significance (maybe up to 130's), even when eating cake, etc. Obviously it varies from person to person, but the fact I would spike easily above 140 with boring foods (steel cut oats with no sweetener as an example) said to me something was wrong. My daily averages hovering around 100 to 105 were not in the pre-diabetes level but were close to it, even when eating minimal carbs and being extremely fit with a natural healthy diet. Also most of what you read out there with CGMs is related to people who actually have diabetes.

Finally, there's no one really to talk to about this stuff. You can eclipse your doctor's knowledge on the topic with about 5-10 hours of research. You can go get a broad set of labs and be right at the edge of the reference range on something (which is, depending on the lab, just a range of the general population, not a healthy range) and your doctor will shrug it off. The system is setup so that as long as you are in a sort of average, even with that average being pretty bad (half of the country is fat and pre-diabetic), the standard of care is to ignore it until you fall off the end. The line between hypochondria and being on top of your health is pretty thin, and most doctors will consider you a hypochondriac if you research and come ready to talk about the topic with any level of knowledge.

[simple10]

Experimenting with GCMs is by far the most useful and fun biohacks I've tried. I was part of the early beta for Levels Health.

Even if you don't suspect underlying health issues, the data provided for health optimization and gamification is worth it.

I used the GCM for 4 weeks and mostly tested how my body responds to various types of foods and meal timing. I also used an Oura ring to track sleep.

Main lessons learned: fat loading in the morning with a bulletproof (ghee) coffee didn't spike glucose and provided sustainable energy. Carbs for dinner helped with sleep but only if the meal was several hours before bed, allowing enough time for the double glucose spikes to return to baseline.

And Japanese sweet potatoes massively spike my glucose unless they're slightly undercooked. Cooking methods significantly changed how my body responded to the food.

[znpy]

I'd really love to be able to do that (experimenting) but i'm in the EU and haven't looked at the possibilities yet (i'm not diabetic).

However i recently saw a video of a woman that carried a glucose monitor (even if she didn't need one) as part of a study (she volunteered) and was able to correlate her mood and her weight take/loss with sugar intake.

I'm very curious about this. I've started a diet recently and after quitting many sources of sugar completely I'm very surprised how long i can go without eating and how little calories per day i can consume (well, as long as i have fat to burn at least).

If anybody wants to chime in and suggest a glucose monitor that i can get without prescription in EU (Italy) and from which i can pull off data, please do.

[dhoe]

I'm in the Netherlands and just bought a Freestyle Libre 3 from https://www.dia-centrum.nl/. It didn't require a prescription and was easy to set up and you can get the data out of Freestyle's website, as a CSV download if I remember correctly.

I had a doctor comment that he'd never seen anybody wearing one just out of interest, and he was slightly condescending about it.

[mikenew]

Can you share a little about the "additional labs" you did?

I wore a CGM for about a month. Also found that my glucose numbers were not nearly as good as I would have expected, especially considering that I'm quite active and not overweight. But it's the "what next" that I'm stuck on.

[anonfornoreason]

https://www.ultalabtests.com/

https://www.ultalabtests.com/test/advanced-cardiovascular-he... https://www.ultalabtests.com/test/hormone-health-men-compreh...

Front page has 20% off coupon. This should get you a pretty wide view. You can add on extras, but this should get you most of what you want to understand. But, this level of lab work is going to require 20+ hours of research to understand, and even more if you pop funny values and want to figure out why. Have fun....

[smallerfish]

Check out Peter Attila's book. He has a couple chapters on metabolic syndrome that should be helpful.

[pastor_bob]

What are 'treatable' causes other than food intake?

[anonfornoreason]

One example is an iron overload disorder. Excess iron accumulates in various organs including your pancreas, liver, and pituitary gland. Catch it early and you can avoid liver cirrhosis, busted pituitary function, poor pancreatic function, heart issues, dementia, etc. Wait too long and you are on the transplant list.

[coldcode]

I found out I was barely in the diabetic range a couple of months ago; hopefully, with diet changes and Metformin, I will see my A1C at a better number in a month or so. Otherwise, I would like to try a CGM to see what I am missing.

[sdo72]

I think I would recommend the opposite unless you are diabetic or pre-diabetic. Using this may make people think eating high GI food causes diabetes.

[epistasis]

Prevention of diabetes or even of pre-diabetes is well worth the experiment. At least for folks in the US, where metabolic syndrome is hanging over the head of a huuuuuge percentage of the population.

Hiding information from people because they might misinterpret it is not a successful medical strategy, the better strategy is to educate, see if the information will be welcome, then provide the information in the context of what it means.

I wasn't technically pre-diabetic, but did have a few higher-than-expected resting glucose blood tests, and the CGM showed me that I'm actually really close to pre-diabetes.

That was the kick I needed to clean up my diet (specifically eat less), exercise 5-7 days of the week, and I'm feeling better than ever.

Anecdata, of course, but there is no single intervention that has been discovered to improve people's weight and metabolic problems in the US (except perhaps the new GLP-1 inhibitors). Adding a CGM, at least for people interested in it, can be very effective, and we should use all the tools we have to improve the population's health.

[NotGMan]

I second, I wore it multiple times as a non-diabetic and it was very enlightening.

[RecycledEle]

I assume you mean you experimented with another CGM, since this one is not on the market yet.