The Truth About Continuous Glucose Monitors (CGMs)

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Continuous Glucose monitors are popping up all over the health technology and wearable industry. Biohackers and athletes alike all looking to get that last little edge are hopping on the CGM train.

But do CGMs (Continuous Glucose Monitors) offer any benefit for those who don’t have prediabetes or diabetes? The answer is unlikely. In this video, I break this down and look at the current evidence that’s out there when it comes to CGMs.

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🙋🏽‍♂️Who am I? My name is Adam and I’m a Registered Performance Nutritionist (MSc), a competitive natural bodybuilder, a remote coach for men and a semi-retired basketball player. I hope you guys enjoy my content!

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Timestamps:

00:00 Intro
00:23 What is blood sugar?
00:49 Will monitoring blood sugar be helpful?
02:00 The problem with CGMs
04:11 Reverse causality
05:10 CGMs in Sports
07:22 Should You Buy one?

If you have any questions or want any general advice/tips I’ll be more than happy to help. Send me a DM on Instagram or drop a comment down below.

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For the Algo:
Are continuous glucose monitors worth it?
Should I buy a CGM?
CGM. Continuous Glucose Monitor review
Performance Nutritionist breaks down CGMs
Are CGMs a Scam?
Should I buy a continuous Glucose monitor

are continuous glucose monitors the biggest Health scam of 2023 a continuous glucose monitor as its name suggests is a way to give you realtime information about what your blood glucose is there are many VC back startups that are investing Millions into the development of these devices that are potentially going to give you the Competitive Edge over your biology but are these products going to disappear just as quickly as they’ve come on the scene everybody has sugar in their blood about a teaspoon worth and our bodies are engineered to keep it roughly at same level if you eat a triple serving of chocolate cake your pancreas will release insulin to store that excess glucose and if you go hours and hours without eating or you fast for multiple days your body will release glucose from your liver in order to keep those blood sugar levels topped up so if you’re somebody that’s looking to optimize your health and performance is monitoring this blood sugar going to give you that edge well let’s find out if you’re new around here my name is Adam MacDonald I’m a performance nutritionist with an msse a competitive natural bodybuilder and a high performance health and fitness coach and lately I have began my doctorate in human performance and innovation in this channel we break down complex health and fitness topics into practical application blood sugar is an energy source particularly for our nervous system our working muscles and our bodies we use more or less depending on the type and intensity of the activity that we’re doing and most people have heard of diabetes which is a chronic illness that affects blood sugar management essentially your body can’t keep sugar in this tightly controlled range by itself and very low or very high blood sugar can be fatal for diabetics therefore people with diabetes need to constantly check their blood sugar levels to adjust their food or medication accordingly to keep it within this range as you can imagine this is a huge pain in the ass so in 1999 the FDA approved the very first continuous glucose monitor a device that track your blood glucose without you having to constantly prick your finger and in this video I’m going to be referring to them as cgms for short since that day almost 25 years ago the industry has evolved to a point where these devices are now available to anybody willing to Fork out the cach to buy them even if you don’t have diabetes and and this is potentially a problem for diabetics these devices can be life-saving and most certainly life-changing but the Silicon Valley tech industry has started to Veer off course from the science and beun pathologizing normal fluctuations in human physiology so is there any utility in cgms for otherwise healthy people well let’s take a look the common claims made by these companies are that cgms can stabilize energy levels help you lose weight improve athletic performance and improve your overall metabolic health is there any truth to that or is this just another marketing gimmick well it’s a little mix of both when it comes to weight loss most people now know that a calorie deficit is required it’s simply the conservation of mass one of the most fundamental principles in physics there are some people who argue that carbs and Insulin make you gain weight independent of a calorie Surplus but the carbohydrate insulin model of obesity has been robustly debunked by now so the cgms help you burn calories well not directly but this study did ask people with diabetes who used the CGM a bunch of questions and 90% of participants felt that they had adopted a healthy lifestyle after they started using one now we don’t have any data on weight loss nor are these people what we would characterize as otherwise healthy individuals but there does seem to be some Merit to the idea that what gets measured gets managed you could potentially get these benefits though from a food diary or even a Fitbit for people who are already eating well and exercising this effect will have less of an impact on you if any at all and it’s hard to say how long this effect would last or if it’s just a novelty metabolic health is definitely a point of contention blood glucose nearly always stays with in a range of 70 to 140 mg per dcil or 3.6 to 7.8 m per liter for people outside of the US and pre-diabetes and diabetes are diagnosed by looking at these levels there are various tests now used by doctors to gather fasting average and acute blood glucose levels for example the oral glucose tolerance test you would consume 75 g of sugar wait 2 hours and then if you had a blood glucose response of over 140 or 7.8 then you might have pre-diabetes but what happens if your CGM says your glue glucose goes up to 160 30 minutes after eating but back to 100 2 hours after eating well we simply don’t really know and it probably doesn’t matter all that much increases in blood glucose even when above this normal range for a short period of time doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s something wrong and it’s important that we don’t use cut offs for current tests and apply those to cgms which are monitoring something different we just don’t have enough data and healthy people with regards to minute-by-minute changes in blood glucose but fluctuations within the normal range is nothing to worry about and it’s what your body is designed to do a common misconception is that because diabetes is diagnosed by high blood sugar keeping your blood sugar low will prevent it this is not accurate as high blood sugar in diabetes is a result of beta cell dysfunction rather than the other way around this is what you call reverse causality for example a sign of a brain tumor is a severe headache however severe headaches don’t cause brain tumors if you had really elevated blood glucose and switched to a low carb diet to reduce blood sugar responses all you’re really doing is putting a plaster over the problem and if you swap out carbs for higher saturated fat options like processed meats or butter then you’re potentially making your health outcomes worse not better as godarts law states when a measure becomes a Target it ceases to be a good measure now there may be some utility for cgms in sports and performance-based settings most people know our bodies use carbohydrates for fuel during exercise and blood glucose makes up a portion of that and many have proposed cgms to be used as a gauge to see how much fuel you have in the tank but energy usage during exercise is a bit more complex than that and muscle fuel used by the body will come from muscle glycogen and fat stores both of which won’t reflect in blood glucose levels it’s also important to note that during exercise blood glucose can Spike even when you haven’t eaten anything this is essentially your liver releasing stored energy further complicating things but in theory they potentially can be used to manage energy levels or avoid bonking during exercise some people may experience a hypoglycemic or low blood sugar event after eating a high amount of carbohydrates often referred to as a sugar crush or rebound hypoglycemia for some people this may result in impaired physical or mental performance and if you’re monitoring what you eat and how close exercise you’re eating it you could look at manipulating that you might even be able to prevent low blood sugar dips proactively during a race before you feel any symptoms if you see that your numbers are starting to dip now this is all really speculative we don’t know what the ideal blood sugar looks like during exercise and not everyone is going to feel or perform worse when their blood sugar does dip to add to that blood sugar is impacted by stress sleep and exercise and this makes things a whole lot more complex and in fact this paper showed that the same person had two completely different responses to the same meal given on different days according to Dr Nicola guess who researches dietry prevention and diabetes while personalized nutrition companies might claim that they are personalizing diet based on a person’s individual biology the available evidence suggest that they are in fact simply recommending A reduced carbohydrate diet to everyone if you’ve purchased a CGM you might have noticed this when the first heart rate monitors were released for for commercial sale in the 1980s people didn’t know what to do with the data they didn’t know if 140 beats per minute when running was good or it was bad or even mattered at all right now we are at this point with cgms the data is often inconsistent this paper showed that two popular brands gave the complete opposite readings on the same person and the technology is just too far ahead of the science right now so if you just like to collect data on yourself and you’re happy to spend up to $400 per month on this then I have nothing against that with that said if you are looking to maximize your health performance my one-on-one coaching is cheaper and will be more effective but I am biased so cgms do have potential in my opinion in the next 5 to 10 years they will become an invaluable tool much like heart rate monitors have but right now the information isn’t all that useful however if you do want more useful information then I invite you to check out this video that I made all about electrolyte supplementation