Why You Might Not Want A Continuous Glucose Monitor

Regular 10almonds readers will know that very often, Good (Or Bad) Health Starts With Your Blood, and for that reason it’s wise to keep our blood sugar levels healthy.

So, in order to keep on top of that, it can be a good idea to Track Your Blood Sugars For Better Personalized Health!

But, it’s also still worth giving a little forethought to the use of Continuous Glucose Monitors (CGM) Without Diabetes ← we talk about some pros and cons here

Here’s one more reason why you might want to skip a CGM, potentially even if you do have diabetes:

Not so fast

New research being presented at the annual meeting of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes chaired by Dr. Amanda Adler & Dr. Melanie Davies examined whether continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) measures were associated (positively or negatively) with day-to-day quality of life in people with type 1 or type 2 diabetes.

And the results? Yes, CGM use was associated (positively or negatively) with day-to-day quality of life in people with type 1 or type 2 diabetes.

Or rather:

• Higher time in range: spending more time in the normal glucose range on one day was significantly associated with better quality of life the following day.
• Higher glucose variability: greater-than-usual glucose variability on one day was also significantly associated with better quality of life the following day.
• Time above or below range: the amount of time spent above 180 mg/dL or below 70 mg/dL on the previous day wasn’t significantly associated with next-day quality of life.
• Same-day glucose: glucose measures from the same day weren’t associated with quality of life on that day.

Per the study authors,

❝These findings may suggest that individuals experience lower quality of life when attempting to minimize glucose fluctuations too strictly, potentially due to the associated burden or restrictions in daily life, which may contribute to some people living with diabetes feeling unable to safely engage in certain activities.❞

In other words: yes it’s good to control your blood sugar levels, but it’s important to actually live also, while doing it!

If you’d like to read the paper in full, so would we, but as as the meeting will be held in a couple of weeks (at time of writing), we only have the press release; you can find more details here.

Want to learn more?

To learn more about how to most easily and effectively manage your blood sugar levels, do swing by these previous main features of ours:

• Improve Your Insulin Sensitivity!
• 10 Ways To Balance Blood Sugars
• Eating For Energy (In Ways That Actually Work)
• Glycemic Index vs Glycemic Load vs Insulin Index
• Which Sugars Are Healthier, And Which Are Just The Same?

And to learn much more deeply about this, check out this excellent book that we reviewed:

Why We Get Sick – by Dr. Benjamin Bikman ← this is about insulin resistance, and, importantly, the invisible insulin resistance that precedes blood sugar imbalances by many years (it goes unnoticed because the pancreas will dutifully keep cranking out more and more insulin to keep the blood sugars stable, until one day it just can’t keep up anymore, and then and only then does prediabetes get diagnosed).

Take care!