We may earn revenue from the products available on this page and participate in affiliate programs. Product news, reviews, and must-have deals. Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe at any time. What if you could walk into a grocery store, scan the barcode on a Rice Krispie treat, and find out how it would affect your blood sugar before buying it? As a middle-aged woman with a family history of diabetes and a pizza weakness, I’ve wanted to try a CGM. After more than a week of testing the January AI system, I found it to be an effective tool that gave me more insight into my metabolic health and actually helped me lose a few pounds. It’s a sizeable investment but can return equally valuable insights if you sign up for a subscription and keep a few things in mind. Includes a comprehensive database of foods.
Verdict: If you’re concerned about your risk of diabetes because of family history, physical health, or age, or you just want personalized recommendations on how to live healthier, the January AI system is a useful and fun tool. What is a continuous glucose monitor (CGM)? Continuous glucose monitors were originally developed in the 1980s to help diabetics keep tabs on their blood glucose, or blood sugar, levels. People with diabetes have trouble making insulin, a hormone secreted by the pancreas that allows glucose to be used by cells for energy. Glucose then remains in the bloodstream, keeping blood sugar levels high over time. Chronic high blood sugar can also damage the kidneys, heart, and nervous system. While CGMs used to require users to prick their fingers to test their blood sugar, newer CGMs include a small sensor that goes under the skin. The sensor will then transmit readings of your glucose levels to a device that will analyze them.
Increasingly, people who aren’t diabetic, including elite athletes, are using CGMs to get a more granular sense of their metabolic health. Other popular CGMs that keep popping up in my Instagram feed include Nutrisense and Levels. Tech sites have speculated for years about Apple’s possible plan to build a CGM into the Apple Watch. However, CGMs still require a medical prescription, and their use by people who haven’t been diagnosed with diabetes has generated debate in the medical community. Other doctors point to the more than 120 million Americans who either already have diabetes or are prediabetic. Peter Attia, M.D., who co-authored the bestselling book, Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity, makes the case that the typical blood sugar tests that patients get annually don’t reveal daily spikes that can signal a brewing problem. "In the vast majority of cases, today’s normal individual is tomorrow’s diabetic patient if something isn’t done to detect and prevent this slide," Attia writes. Fluctuating glucose levels have also been associated with an increased risk of heart disease, cancer, and Alzheimer’s disease, he notes.
While I’m generally healthy, GlycoCares.netglucose metabolism I was interested in learning more about my blood sugar levels and how they might affect my life. My parents had been diagnosed with Type II diabetes in their 40s, so I checked the family history box. After losing weight early in the pandemic, I put on some pounds last year. And despite training for my first marathon, I found that all the exercise wasn’t helping get me into better shape as easily as running did when I was younger. True, the lab results from the last time I was tested after a visit to my primary Glyco Care dosage doctor in September 2022 passed muster. My glucose level of 87 milligrams per deciliter (mg/dL) was in the middle of the normal range, but my hemoglobin A1C-the standard test that measures the average of blood glucose over 90 days-was 5.5%, on the high side of normal. According to the CDC, a reading of 99 mg/dL or lower is normal for fasting blood sugar, while 100 to 125 mg/dL signals that you’re prediabetic, and 126 mg/dL or higher indicates you have diabetes.
Would seeing those spikes on my phone just after eating help me make better decisions? Monitoring daily fluctuations in blood sugar can provide a much better window into your metabolic health, says Noosheen Hashemi, January’s co-founder and CEO. She became passionate about a more holistic approach to health care after learning the truth about her parents’ medical conditions. Doctors failed to diagnose her father with prostate cancer while he was being treated for another cancer. And her mother’s heart failure was misdiagnosed as asthma. "Once you fall into that sick journey, all sorts of things can happen to you," Hashemi says. "So I became obsessed with: ‘How can we know sooner, what can we know, and why do we know so little? She teamed up with Michael Snyder, Ph.D., chair of Genetics and Director of Genomics and Personalized Medicine at Stanford School of Medicine. Snyder was conducting research that revealed a population of people who looked to have healthy blood sugar levels actually frequently had spikes in which their glucose reached diabetic levels.